Innocence Lost – Becoming Myra McQueen
by Reynsi
Summary: Myra, matriarch of the McQueen family, hasn't always been the feisty woman she is today. This fic follows her life from her late teens until she arrives on the screen in the autumn of 2006. Feel free to comment!
1. Chapter 1

**Innocence Lost – Becoming Myra McQueen**

I wrote this fic way back in 2007 and 2008 so some of the things in it have later been contradicted by the show itself, and may seem far-fetched by now. Still, I like it and hope you guys here enjoy it. I have to admit, I'm actually quite proud of it! :)

**1) Great Expectations**

'She's gonna be somebody, our Myra!' had been the family motto for as long as Myra McQueen could remember. And Myra was determined that that was exactly what she was gonna do, she was gonna be the McQueen who would break the mould, she was gonna go to college, study English and become a teacher.

Ever since her first day at school, she'd known that she belonged in the classroom. She loved the smell of the chalk and the blackboard, she loved the sound of her classmates stuttering with their reading and quietly practicing their writing and their adding and subtracting. She even loved the noisy disruptions, the boys running after each other and the fun she had with her girlfriends on the school grounds.

Celebrating her sixteenth birthday, Myra was still at the top of her class, and earlier that week the head teacher had approached her, asking whether she had started thinking about college. She had of course said "yes," she'd been thinking about college for years, but she also knew that her family would never in a million years be able to send her to any of the top colleges in the country. They would even be struggling to send her to the local college, but that was a struggle they were all willing to take on.

Hearing this, the head teacher had told her that she wasn't just the top of her year, in fact she was the best pupil he had ever met at their school. That's why he'd done some research into funding available for students like her and he'd told her the surprising news that with the grades she'd been receiving through the years, she might even be eligible for a full grant at some of the top colleges, which would cover both tuition fees and halls accommodation.

She excitedly told her parents what the head teacher had said and they were as excited as she was, but still tried to keep calm as they didn't want to be too optimistic. College was after all three years away and the McQueens knew that money didn't grow on trees, especially for people like them. But Myra was certain she would get this grant, she just knew it in her heart.

Her parents had organised a big party for her birthday, her mother had baked some cakes and her entire family and her best girlfriends were there. After the cake had been eaten, her dad went down the pub with her older brothers and other family members and surprisingly her mum had decided to join them, leaving the girls alone in the flat.

When the grown-ups had left, her friend Shirley told them that a boy in the year above was having a birthday party at his place and that his friend had told them that everyone was invited. Myra was uncertain whether they should be leaving her place as her parents hadn't told her she was allowed to go out for the night, but her friends pestered her and finally managed to convince her to come along – it was after all her birthday!

At the party, it turned out there were only boys there, all of them older than they were, and most of them were drinking. Shirley introduced Myra as the 'birthday girl' to the entire party so all of them were really friendly, and after a while, she found herself sitting on a sofa in the living room talking to a handsome dark-haired boy, well a young man really. His name was Michael and he was the older brother of John, the birthday boy. She was handed a drink and believing it was lemonade, she took a sip. When she tasted it she winced at the surprising bitterness. Michael laughed and asked whether she'd never had a G&T before. She smiled shyly as she shook her head and took another sip.


	2. Chapter 2

**2) Great Expectations II**

A few weeks had past since her birthday. Myra had been busy concentrating on her studies, preparing for exams and somehow she managed to push the memory of what had happened that night to the back of her mind. Well, almost. Whenever she wasn't focusing on her schoolwork, the thought of what she and Michael had done up in his room crawled back up and made her cringe.

Myra had been surprised how different the experience had been from what she'd always thought it would be. She'd always thought she'd get married some day and that this wouldn't happen until the wedding night. It wasn't that she felt used, or thought the experience had been sordid or anything like that. It was more like she felt she'd been cheated by herself, that it hadn't been the amazing thing she'd always expected and hoped for.

The next day, she'd told Shirley what happened that night. She just needed to confide in someone that she'd lost her virginity, and Shirley had already had two boyfriends and had shared her own story with Myra a year earlier. No one apart from Shirley knew what had happened at the party, all her friends had been preoccupied flirting with some other lads. Her parents didn't even know that they'd left the house that night, as Myra had managed to sneak back home before anyone was back from the pub.

She'd seen Michael around a few times and they'd always smiled at each other and exchanged a couple of words but nothing more had happened. Not that she wanted it to – she had her plans for the future and a relationship with Michael Thompson was definately not a part of those plans. Still, she had to admit to herself that she fancied him. Even if he'd already left school and was trying to find a job. Well, trying, but not too hard.

The morning after her last exam, Myra had woken up feeling a bit nauseous. As she came down to breakfast, her mother looked at her with concern and asked whether she felt alright. Myra told her she felt a bit off, but reasoned it must be the effect of the exam stress; she'd been unusually nervous those last couple of weeks but managed to push everything aside – maybe it was just the body finally allowing itself to react.


	3. Chapter 3

**3) The Dream Crushed**

"No daughter of mine is going to have an abortion! I won't have it!"

Decades later Myra could still remember her father shouting those words in the kitchen of her childhood home. Those words that effectively had sealed her fate, taken away her childhood and forced her to become an adult. In one instant, Myra's father had taken away her dream of a good college education, taken away the only future she'd ever imagined, and if it hadn't been for her mother who had been standing next to her at the time, she'd have dead fainted on the kitchen floor.

Her father had always been a religious man and a strong believer in the proper way to behave, at least when it came to other people. He'd had affairs, Myra knew, and there were even rumours about a kid in the class below her being his son, but somehow, in his home, he'd always kept up the front of a saint. Still, neither Myra nor her mother had expected this reaction when they decided to tell him the news.

It was Myra's mum who first realised the state of things, noticing how Myra's pack of tampons in the bathroom didn't move for almost three months. Myra herself hadn't had a clue that the nausea and the physical changes she'd felt had anything to do with pregnancy. She was after all only sixteen years old, and she hadn't really got to know her teenage body enough to realise what was happening to her.

Her mother had confronted her, asked whether it could be possible that she was pregnant and when Myra finally confessed to having had sex, she'd taken her to see the family GP. Then, they'd decided together that an abortion was the only way out.

The abortion hadn't only been her mother's idea. Finding out she was pregnant had been a huge shock for Myra and after thinking about it for a few days, she really believed that an abortion was the right thing for her.

After her father's harsh rejection, Myra's mother begged him to reconsider. It was after all 1981 and things had changed a great deal since his day, and it was Myra's future they were discussing. But he wouldn't budge, Myra would just have to marry the guy and that was the end of it.


	4. Chapter 4

**4) An Adult Child**

Mr Simons, the head teacher, was very disappointed that morning when Myra told him about the pregnancy and how she wouldn't be returning to school for the next school year. When he noticed how upset she was, he told her that she would always be welcome back while he was in charge and that if she'd need anything, he'd try his best to help.

And it wasn't only her life at school she was about to leave. Her father had managed to persuade Mr Thompson, Michael's father, that Myra and Michael had to get married before her pregnancy would be obvious to everybody. The wedding was set for early summer after which Myra was not only supposed to become a Thompson by name, she was also to move in with her husband's family. Mr Thompson had even agreed that the young couple should live with him and his family for the first few years, until they were old enough to and financially capable of living on their own.

Myra didn't really know the Thompson family at all, had only visited their house a few times and now she was supposed to move in with them. Even her husband was virtually a stranger, though he had always been very kind and sweet towards her. It had, of course, been a great shock to him to find out that he was to become a father at the age of nineteen, but he seemed to really like Myra and tried his best to be supportive.

Myra would never forget the fear she felt when she went down to the Thompson family breakfast table the morning after their wedding night. But her fear soon turned out to be unnecessary and she was surprised by how welcome the Thompson's made her feel on her first day in their household and she soon settled in.

Even if she'd moved houses, she still saw her mother almost every day of her pregnancy, at first mostly in her old home but as she felt increasingly tired and immobile, her mother would come to see her at the Thompson's. The night she went into labour, Myra asked for her mother to be in the room with her as she didn't really want Michael there. Back then, Myra didn't understand her reasons for wanting her mum there instead of her husband, but later in life, she understood that this was the moment when she would be leaving the last traces of childhood behind, and that she wanted to feel her mother's love and support, and just to be her little girl for that little bit longer.


	5. Chapter 5

**5) ... And Jacqui Makes Three**

Little Jacqueline Bernadette Thompson was born early the next morning, a healthy baby with powerful lungs. Myra took one look at her and instantly knew that she would never be the same person again. This tiny little thing had all of a sudden become the most important thing in her life and she could physically feel her heart grow and expand, almost like the little one was supposed to physically fit in there.

Myra's fears that she wouldn't know how to take care of a little baby soon disappeared as she found that she was a natural with her daughter. Jacqui was a good baby, she slept throughout most nights and was obviously content in her mother's presence. Not that Myra and Michael didn't have their share of sleepless nights, they did, especially when Jacqui started teething. Still, the young couple knew it could be much worse.

Michael was proving to be a reliable husband and father, and him and Myra were really getting along, maybe they were even growing to love each other. A month into their marriage, he finally managed to find himself a job as a dustman, bringing in regular wages, and half a year later, without Myra knowing, he started looking for a flat of their own.

One afternoon, he came home all smiles as he sat down in the kitchen. His mum knew what was going on so she had decided to run some errands while he told Myra the news. Myra brought him a cup of tea and asked why he was looking at her like that. He then produced a signed contract for the lease of a two-bedroom flat in the same neighbourhood. Myra was totally taken aback by this news, she'd somehow got used to living with the Thompson's and hadn't really thought about finding their own place. She was even more surprised by the sheer joy and excitement she felt at the news.

Two weeks later they moved into their new flat and later in life, Myra came to regard their first night there as their 'real wedding night'.

That night, with Jacqui sleeping soundly in her cot next to their bed, Michael and Myra finally realised that they actually did love one another, and they made love with a passion neither of them had experienced before.


	6. Chapter 6

**6) The Second Blow**

"You're pregnant again, Mrs Thompson!" The GP confirmed Myra's sneaking suspicion. Still, the first weeks of this second pregnancy were rather different from her first one. The first time around, Myra had only slightly felt the famous morning sickness, and actually only in the mornings, but this time around it was far worse. Her breast hurt all the time and at first she thought that was because she was breastfeeding Jacqui. Then the morning sickness started, only now lasting all day long for a full month and she felt constantly tired. Myra had always been rather plump but in a few weeks she lost a lot of weight.

It was Michael who'd begged her to go see the doctor, as he'd noticed how little she was eating and how pale she'd become. He didn't suspect that she was pregnant, though, but thought it was only the breastfeeding that was taking its toll on her body.

Myra told Michael the news later that day and he was over the moon. He really enjoyed fatherhood and thought it would be great for little Jacqui to get a little brother or a sister to grow up with. Myra, on the other hand, had been thinking about ways to get back to school the following year and therefore wasn't particularly happy about the news and she went about the flat moping for days, wondering whether she should have an abortion this time around. Feeling Michael's excitement, however, she soon melted and little by little she started looking forward to having the new baby.

One day, she visited her old friends at the school. As she was leaving the building, she ran into Mr Simons, the head teacher. He looked admiringly at baby Jacqui who was sleeping in her buggy and told Myra, how they all were missing her there at the school. Myra had already been feeling a bit upset, missing school and hearing this, she just started crying and told Mr Simons that her plans of coming back were ruined now that she was pregnant again. He then escorted her to his office where they had a good chat, where he kindly told her that lots of changes were happening these days, enabling young mothers to seek further education.

Because of the chat and Mr Simons' kindness, it was a more hopeful and optimistic Myra who came back home later that day to find a policeman waiting outside her door. Three hours earlier, Michael had accidentally been run over by his own dustcart and had died instantly.


	7. Chapter 7

**7) Breaking Down**

Suddenly widowed at the age of 17, Myra Thompson thought life just couldn't treat her any worse. She had no real income so she didn't see any other way than to give up her flat a few weeks after Michael's funeral. It wasn't like she'd really wanted to stay there alone with the baby – she'd been wandering about the little flat all this time feeling lost and alone ever since Michael died, but it still felt strange to leave her first adult home, a home where she'd been surprisingly happy, even if it was only for a few great weeks.

The most logical place for her to go and stay was her parents, she thought. Her father, on the other hand, did not agree; he now saw her as a Thompson rather than a McQueen, and so he wanted her to go stay with her in-laws. This time, however, Myra's mum put her foot down, a firm foot that wouldn't be budged – Myra was to move back into her old room and they would take care of her and little Jacqui and the unborn child for as long as they needed.

No sooner had Myra moved back in her old room than the reality of her situation hit her. Even if she was only 17, she had been forced to become an adult an eternity of a few months before, and looking at her old bedroom, she could only see the bedroom of an innocent teenage girl. She laid herself on her bed and closed her eyes, took in her old smell and tried what she could to become that teenage girl again.

Two months later, Myra had hardly left that bed. After a few days trying without success to get Myra to feed and take care of the baby, her mum had seen no other choice but to take little Jacqui into her own bedroom as Myra was in no state to take care of her daughter. The whole family, even her father, had tried everything they could to get her to get out of bed, but to no avail. She hadn't shown an interest in anything, and had hardly opened her mouth all this time. It wasn't until one night when she suddenly woke up with a shooting pain in her abdomen that her family actually heard her voice for the first time in weeks.

Shouting out for her mum, Myra was immediately taken to hospital where she went through many checks before the doctor told her, and her mum who was in the room with her, that she was fine for now but had almost had a miscarriage due to malnourishment. Hearing her doctor saying this, her mum could see the spark returning to Myra's eyes – she was not going to loose Michael's baby like this.

It was a totally different Myra who returned home the next day. The first thing she did was to have a decent meal before taking a shower – without her mum's help, even if she felt wobbly after lying in bed pregnant for months. Then she went down to the hairdresser's and asked for a haircut.

Myra had always had very long brown hair, but that day she returned home sporting a stylish Toyah Wilcox-like haircut and when she saw her father's face, she had to sit down on the living room sofa laughing hysterically.

She started inviting her old friends home and her mum moved Jacqui's cot back into her room. Realising that she now only breastfed a portion of what she'd done before her break-down, Myra decided that she was gonna do so much better with the unborn baby – Michael would be so proud of her.


	8. Chapter 8

**8) Tender Mercies**

"You're naming the child after a car? Why not Rolls Royce then? To English, ay?" Her father was the first one to criticise the name. Myra tried to explain what the name meant, that it was a good catholic name, but he just shook his head and walked away as she refused to back down.

Myra had done some Spanish at school with a beautiful young Spanish teacher named Mercedes and she'd never forgot how softly the name seemed to roll off her tongue and how the teacher had told them it meant 'God's mercies' or 'God's gifts'. And the first time Myra held her new baby daughter, she took one look at her and saw how much like Michael she looked, and she knew that this tiny baby was his gift to her, his mercy, his 'mercedes'.

Her mother just smiled and squeezed Myra's hand where she was lying in her hospital bed with baby Mercedes by her side. "Mercy, I like that!" she said and that was that.

Myra couldn't believe how different her two daughters were. Where Jacqui had been a relatively quiet infant who slept most of the time, the younger one demanded constant attention from the moment she came home, first by staying awake crying most of the time and as she grew from baby to a toddler, with giggling and laughter. Still, Myra felt strangely energetic. She didn't mind the sleeplessness, somehow she felt she'd had enough sleep those month she'd stayed in bed and she was determined not to make her daughters feel any less love or attention than if their father had still been there. If she wasn't feeding them, she was changing them, and if she wasn't changing them, she was singing for them or playing with them on a blanket on the floor or taking them out for walks, to the park or to visit Michael's parents.

Her family did not however feel that this hyperactive behaviour was much healthier than her lie-in had been. Still, no one seemed to dare say anything to Myra herself. It turned out to be Michael's father who first sat his daughter-in-law down for a talk. He persuaded her to allow his wife, the girls' grandmother, to take them out for a good walk, and then he told her to join him in the living room. Myra would never forget this conversation. She felt like she'd always imagined being sent to the headmaster's office must feel like and thought he was gonna have a go at her for something.

She didn't expect what he had to say at all. He quietly started talking about how Michael had been as a boy. How he'd loved to play footie from before he could walk. How he'd stormed off in a mood when he didn't get his way as a teenager. How he'd told his dad when he was six years old that he was gonna become a millionaire and have a wife and lots of kids. And how he'd later told him how happy he was with Myra and little Jacqui.

Hearing this, Myra's dam suddenly burst open and she just cried and cried. He took her in his arms and held her there until he could hear her breathing change. She'd finally fallen asleep.


	9. Chapter 9

**9) Lost In Music**

Life slowly settled in some kind of normality. Little Mercy was still not sleeping well, but Myra had started to accept her family's help with the babies so she could get a few hours of sleep during the daytime. Her little brother, Paul, who was three years younger than Myra and had always been a bit of a rascal, was proving to be a decent babysitter and when he was at home Jacqui tried her best to follow him on her wobbly feet. Shirley, Myra's best friend, who had felt shut out after Myra's wedding and then thought she wasn't welcome after Michael's death, had finally visited her one day and they'd cried a bit together, but more importantly, they had laughed together, just like the old times. Since then, Shirley came to visit almost every day and when Paul or Myra's mum had the girls, the two friends almost felt fifteen again.

Shirley had even managed to persuade Myra to come down the pub a few times and they'd had a really good time, and Myra had even started noticing a few young men giving her the eye. On her nineteenth birthday, Shirley insisted, with the help of Myra's mum and two other old friends, that they'd go to a club downtown in Liverpool to celebrate. At first Myra tried her best to get out of this – she tried to tell them she'd much rather have a party at home or meet friends and family in the pub, but her friends were having none of it. She could always go down the pub, and if she really wanted to go there more often, well, then they weren't stopping her. And as to a party at home, how would she have fun with the noise keeping her girls awake? So Myra was outnumbered, and for once outwitted and on her birthday evening she found herself on the bus downtown. They would first be going out to an Indian restaurant and then they'd go to a newly opened club that was very popular with people their age.

The evening proved to be a success; the food was just perfect and the music at the club just right – Myra just adored Duran Duran and that Like A Virgin song was really good, so she stayed on the dance floor with her friends most of the night. Her friends had been buying rounds throughout the evening so Myra insisted that the last round should be on her and went to the bar to get it in. As she was waiting to be served a tall thin man with light brown skin and sparkling brown eyes approached her and started chatting, telling her that he'd noticed her on the dance floor. Myra turned towards him and smiled, but didn't expect to be drawn in by his full lips and shiny white teeth. A few minutes later, she quickly took the drinks to her friends before she joined her new friend on the dance floor, and when the Careless Whisper saxophone solo started, she was already lost in his arms.


	10. Chapter 10

**10) Decision Time**

'This can't be happening! It mustn't! This just can't be happening!' Myra tried to banish what she knew deep down was happening to her by repeating these words in her mind like a mantra. They didn't of course have any effect – she was just as pregnant three days later and she knew it was only a question of getting it confirmed when she went to see the doctor.

How was she supposed to deal with the situation? She was still a teenager, a mother of two, a widow and now she was pregnant again, and the father was an unknown black man! The only thing she knew about him was that his name was Andrew and that he was a bingo caller from South London. How could she have been so stupid as to go with him to his hotel room that night? And how unlucky can one person be? Thinking these thoughts on her way from the doctor's office, she decided to stop at Shirley's and talk to her best friend. Shirley listened and tried to be supportive, but they both knew that Myra had to make a really difficult decision. Should she tell her parents and risk their anger or should she arrange to have an abortion this time? Her father didn't really need to know and he even might approve this time, if he knew all the circumstances.

Myra knew that abortion might be the most sensible solution to her problems. Still, she wasn't sure whether that was the right decision for her. After the initial shock of realising she was pregnant again, she really started thinking about the tiny little thing as her baby. Funny how things can change like that. When she'd got pregnant at sixteen, she'd really wanted to have that abortion and then she wasn't allowed to, and now when the power actually was in her own hands, she didn't really want to have one.

As she opened her front door that afternoon, she knew that she'd made up her mind. She was gonna have the baby and deal with whatever consequences there might be. She knew she was strong enough. That's why she sat her parents down already that evening and told them calmly about her situation.

Her father went mental upon hearing that his daughter had once again got herself knocked up, and this time by a black guy! He called her nasty names but Myra just sat there quiet and calm and allowed him to get it out. Her mother cried a little to begin with but her husband's rage shook her up and she told him not to use words like that about anyone in her house, least of all their own daughter. If he couldn't be civil, he should rather say nothing at all.

With that, Myra's father stood up and left the room and he didn't talk to his daughter for two weeks, not until he heard the sound of her morning sickness coming from the bathroom. At that moment, his anger vanished in an instant and he quietly opened the bathroom door and walked over to the toilet where he held his daughter's forehead while she threw up.


	11. Chapter 11

**11) Breaking The News**

If Myra had thought it would be difficult to tell her own parents that she was pregnant again, it was nothing compared to the dread she felt on her way up the road to Betty and Pete, Michael's parents. She was now three months pregnant and she wanted them to hear it from herself, not some stranger on the street. Ever since Michael's death his parents had treated her very well, really like their own daughter and they'd often taken Jacqui and Mercy to stay with them so that Myra could have some time for herself once in a while.

As she stood outside the Thompson's house, she took one deep breath before she knocked on the door and opened it to let herself in. Pete and Betty were both sat in their living room, watching some comedy programme on the telly. They welcomed her with smiles and Betty told her to get some tea from the kitchen. She did and took a seat in the sofa, next to her mother-in-law. When the programme ended, she told them she had some difficult news and Pete asked with concern whether something was wrong with any of the girls. She assured him that they were both fine, were already asleep when she left them with her brother. Then she went on and told them the news, that she was pregnant.

They all sat in silence for a few minutes, until Pete finally spoke and asked her who the father was, whether she'd been dating him for some time and if she thought they'd have a future together. She told him that she'd met Andrew in a club in Liverpool on her birthday, and didn't really know much about him, so she'd be on her own with three children when the time would come. She also assured the Thompson's that the fact that she was meeting other men, did not mean that she'd forgot all about Michael, he'd always be with her and their daughters.

Betty then assured her that they would continue to help out, that they'd be grandparents to the new baby, just as much as to Jacqui and Mercy, and Pete nodded in agreement and gave her a big hug as she was about to leave.

The remaining time of the pregnancy went more or less without a hitch. She got looks from people in the neighbourhood as her condition became apparent, but she got over the embarrassment when she was pregnant the first time around, so this time it didn't bother her – not much anyway. She knew that she'd probably get even more looks with the three children after the birth so she'd better just deal with it.

She was in the kitchen feeding Mercy when she went into labour. Knowing that it would be hours until the baby would be born, Myra just continued feeding her daughter, then she did the dishes and put the dirty nappies in the washing machine before she went up to her room to get her things ready for the hospital as she waited for her mum to come back from the shops.

Twenty-eight hours later, Betty Thompson quietly opened the door to Myra's hospital room, and looked in through the doorway, all smiles, before she entered the room at Myra's urging. Pete followed right behind her, carrying a huge teddy bear. They reached the bed and Betty asked whether she could see the little one before she bent over the baby girls cot. Her smile disappeared instantly as she saw the little girl, and Myra knew that she would never forgive her mother-in-law for the disgusted look on her face as she shouted "She's black!?"


	12. Chapter 12

**12) Happy Birthday, Mrs McQueen**

Myra lay in her bed and enjoyed one of those rare few minutes of complete silence in the McQueen house. She hadn't slept much during the night. Little Tina had been up most of the night crying but had finally fallen asleep around five o'clock. Myra knew that it wouldn't be long before Jacqui would wake up and come running to her bed to cuddle with her mum for a few minutes before the whole household would get up and start preparing for work.

This wasn't exactly how she'd envisioned the start of her twentieth birthday four years earlier. Back then she'd thought that she'd be preparing for classes at college, probably living in halls at some of the better universities in the country and that it would be her mates who'd wake her up – not three daughters.

It was Myra's twentieth birthday and she knew it was time for a change. Her little family was becoming just that – her own family. Jaqui was just over three years old and really needed her own bedroom and it would soon be time for Mercedes to move out of her mum's bedroom as well.

It was time, Myra thought to herself, for her to find a place of her own, for her and her girls. She knew she probably would be entitled to a council flat and some benefits that should cover the extra cost of living by themselves, and she knew she couldn't be too proud to accept all the help she could get.

Myra also knew that it was time for her to leave the Thompson name behind and become a McQueen again. She hadn't been in touch with Betty and Pete since that day in the hospital when they'd made it perfectly clear that they could never accept little Tina as a part of their family. Myra had been devastated when she saw her in-laws' reactions, but she'd still managed to keep calm when she'd told them that Jacqui and Mercy were Tina's big sisters and if any one of them wouldn't be welcome anywhere, then the same would apply for the others.

Pete had phoned Myra's father a few times and begged him to help them to see their granddaughters, but when it was clear he'd only meant Jacqui and Mercy, Myra's dad had, for once, taken his daughter's side and told the Thompson's to stay away. It broke Myra's heart to cut all ties with Michael's family, but if Tina could not be a Thompson, then neither could she nor her older daughters.

She looked over to the bunk bed where her two older girls were fast asleep and smiled at the quiet innocence that shone from their faces. 'If only you'd known your dad,' she thought to herself with regret as she sat up in her bed. She checked that Tina was asleep as she put on her dressing gown and her slippers before finding her way down the stairs to the kitchen. Once there, she put the kettle on before she picked up the phone and dialed the number she knew so well. Three seconds later, the phone was picked up in the Thompson kitchen, and she heard her mother-in-law's voice for the first time in over three months.


	13. Chapter 13

**13) The Social Stigma**

It had never been easy to be a McQueen and Myra would be the last to say that the McQueen name had ever worked in her favour. Still, due to how well she'd always done at school, she'd never really been a victim of the stigma associated with the name because of the shady dealings of her father, her uncles and her grandfather. That is, not until she was sitting opposite Ms Hastings, the tired middle-aged social worker assigned to her case.

Feeling the animosity across the desk as the gray Ms Hastings read through her application for support, Myra at first felt scared that she'd turn her down. This was her first time in this situation, being evaluated by a stranger, somebody who didn't know anything about her past, only that she was a twenty-year-old single mother of three.

As she sat there waiting for Ms Hastings response, Myra heard her sigh to herself, "One of those!" before she looked up, smirking, just as she spoke up. "A McQueen, I see! Any relation to John and Bobby McQueen?" She didn't wait for a reply. "So here you are, a single mum, three kids, and want the social to take care of you?"

Myra tried to mutter a reply but the words just came out all wrong and Ms Hastings seized the opportunity and started going on about promiscuous young girls with no future other than to get themselves knocked up so that they'd be taken care of. "And in your case," she pointed at Myra, "three times over, by three men, no doubt!"

Hearing those last words, it was like something kicked in inside Myra and she was finally able to focus. She then pointed out that Ms Hastings should familiarise herself better with her cases before making judgments. Myra's three children had two different fathers, one of whom had been her husband who had been killed in a terrible accident, leaving her a widow at the age of seventeen. And as to having no future, she told her that she'd been the best student at her school, but it had been her father who'd had forbidden her to get an abortion when she'd first got pregnant.

Hearing her own voice echoing around the room, she not only noticed the other social workers and their clients looking at her, she realised how incredibly angry she was – at herself for being so foolish, at her father to take away her right to decide for herself, and at Michael for leaving her.

Ms Hastings was used to all kinds of outbursts in her office, but hearing Myra's words she felt something rather unusual in her heart, – shame, – and as Myra sat back in her chair, softly crying, she stood up and walked over to her, and for the first time in twenty years, she actually touched a client as she took the young woman's head in her arms and just allowed her to cry.


	14. Chapter 14

**14) Fish And Chips**

Already two weeks after her harrowing meeting with the social worker, Myra moved into a three bedroom council flat in a newly-built neighbourhood. Her father and brothers helped her with the move, both with what she took of her old things and what her oldest brother had somehow – how, she didn't really want to know – managed to get her everything else she needed to start her new life together with her daughters.

After all the furniture had been put in their place and the boxes into the right rooms, Myra unpacked the necessary things for her daughters and her dad opened a bottle of bubbly to celebrate her moving in. As they cheered for her new flat, her dad suggested they'd have dinner down her new local pub and offered that Paul would then look after the girls as he wasn't 18 yet and would have to leave the pub after dinner anyway. So Myra agreed right away and arranged a bottle for Paul to give Tina when she'd wake up and off they went.

The fish and chips at the pub was exactly what the they needed after the day's hard work and the pints just kept coming to their table. They'd been sitting there for two and a half hours when Donny, one of her older brothers had spotted some old mates sitting at a table in the other part of the pub. He went over to talk to them and a couple of minutes later the entire gang stood up from their table and walked over to join the McQueen's.

"These are two old mates, Marty and Ricky." Donny pointed at the two blond guys next to him and they took chairs from a nearby table and joined the McQueen table. Marty happened to sit next to Myra and they soon started chatting.

Marty was a great listener and Myra found herself drawn to him, telling him everything that had happened to her in the last four years. He told her about how he'd always wanted to be a policeman, but things in his home had kind of forced him to move out and live on the street when he was sixteen and then one thing had led to another and he'd been involved in a few break-ins when he was nineteen so he'd been sent to prison for a few months were he and Ricky had met Donny. He had just finished telling her how he now was trying to stay on the straight and narrow, when a voice from the other side of the table interrupted them.

"Straight and narrow? That's the last thing you could say about your hole!" Ricky was grinning at them before turning to Myra. "You like my little poof of brother?"


	15. Chapter 15

**15) Moving On Marty**

Myra'd had a really good time that night in the pub, and when she met Marty by coincidence a week later they started chatting again like they'd known each other their entire lives.

That day, Myra had taken her daughters to the park in the morning. Jacqui was proving to be an extremely energetic child who needed a lot of space to run around and play. She preferred to play with boys rather than girls, and Myra had given up on putting her in nice dresses a long time ago. Mercy, on the other hand, liked to play by herself with her doll near her mum and would cry if a piece of sand or dirt touched her anywhere.

After the park, Myra had decided she'd might as well go to the local supermarket and do some shopping. It was when she was leaving the store that she ran into Marty and she didn't realise they'd actually stood there chatting for half an hour until Jacqui started tucking at her trousers, begging for them to go on home. Myra was then forced to move quickly so she invited Marty to dinner the next night.

When she came home, she was feeling all excited and decided that it would probably not be a good idea to get any of her family involved by asking them to babysit, so she phoned Shirley who agreed right away to take the girls.

Myra made her best dish, real Indian curry she'd learned at school how to make, and the two of them really enjoyed the food, drinking a few beers along the way. After dinner they moved into her living room and Myra was preparing herself for a romantic scene when Marty told her that his brother Ricky hadn't been joking that night in the pub – that he actually was gay, and that that had been the real reason why he'd been forced to leave home when he was a teenager. Trying to hide her disappointment and embarrassment, Myra gave him a big hug and told him she'd kind of known all along, how else could he have been such a great guy to talk to.

They had a few more drinks after that and the atmosphere soon relaxed and Myra started to just enjoy the company of a new friend. Before long, they decided to see whether there were any fun people in the pub. Sitting there, they found a rather drunk but cheerful Ricky who laughed and shouted at them: "Ain't it my fairy brother and his new girlfriend!" at which Myra just blushed as they sat down at his table.

The next morning, it was a very hung over Myra who stumbled out of bed to her bathroom to throw up and she didn't noticed Ricky sleeping in her bed until she returned a couple of minutes later with an alkaseltzer dissolving in a glass of water.


	16. Chapter 16

**16) The Day I**

The next two months were the happiest Myra had experienced since Michael died and at the time she thought that this was due to her being in love with Ricky and him being in love with her. After the hazy memory of their first night together, the passion between the two had just seemed to grow and he had, in all but name, moved in with her and the girls. Not that he showed the girls much interest or attention, he hardly ever saw them awake as he always came home late at night. Instead it was Marty who was there for Myra during this time, keeping her company and helping her out with the girls, only to leave just before they knew Ricky would be turning up. Much later in life Myra actually came to the conclusion that she hadn't really been in a romantic relationship with Ricky, it had only been sexual, and she realised that it had actually been Marty who she'd been dating all along, and that it had been him who'd made her so happy during those weeks.

Then the day came – the day that everything went horribly wrong.

The day started out in such a innocently normal way. Myra had woken up to Tina's crying and hurried out of bed to calm down her daughter as she didn't want the others to wake up just yet. She'd then taken Tina into the kitchen where she sat down on a chair and prepared to breastfeed her. Then, as her daughter started sucking on her nipple, she'd realised that her breasts were unusually sore. Fearing what this might mean, she looked at the calendar on the kitchen wall and her heart skipped a beat, it obviously was happening again! And she'd been on the pill and all this time around!

Thinking it through as she breastfed her daughter, she decided she wouldn't tell Ricky anything about it, not yet at least, as she wanted to be completely certain about this before she'd make any announcements, so when he finally woke up, she just put on her best smile and pretended that everything was normal. She even went to the trouble of taking one of her tampons from the bag and trowing it in the bin, just so that he wouldn't suspect anything, in the unlikely case that he'd notice how many were left in the bathroom cupboard, like her mum had done those few years before.

Later that morning, Ricky left, kissed her and the girls goodbye and went to the dole office as he'd had problems finding a job since he came out of prison. When he was gone, Myra prepared the girls for a day in the park, and called Marty to see if he wanted to look after Jacqui and Mercy for an hour, while she'd go to the doctor. Marty told her 'no problem', but not until the afternoon as he himself had to see the doctor that morning. He'd had a bad cold for two weeks and was finally doing what Myra had constantly been telling him to do, to see a doctor. They then arranged to meet in the park at two o'clock.

The morning passed by rather quickly, Tina slept peacefully most of the time and Myra was just sat there reading a book, while the older girls played. At one o'clock she gave them some sandwiches and crisps she'd prepared in the morning and then waited for Marty to arrive. Two o'clock came, and then it was two thirty and he was not there. It wasn't until three o'clock that Myra noticed the familiar figure approaching. She was just about to tell him off for being so late when she noticed that he was crying.

She hurried towards him, leaving the buggy and Mercy playing next to it. She then took him in her arms and asked what was wrong.

Never in a thousand years could she have prepared herself for the answer.


	17. Chapter 17

**17) The Day II**

"They think I have AIDS!" Those five little words would never leave Myra and she knew right away that her friend had just been given a death sentence. Lost for words, she only held him in her arms and let him cry, before they sat on the bench next to Tina's buggy, holding hands and not saying anything. Noticing how upset Marty was, Jacqui crawled into his lap and gave him a big hug, which resulted in him starting crying again. She then gave him a big kiss before running back to her mates.

Taking care of her friend, Myra completely forgot about her own problems and when they returned home later that night, she opened up a bottle of wine and they sat in her living room, with the telly on, drinking and talking for the whole night. Marty finally told her everything about his life on the street. The first time they'd met, he'd kind of glamourised that time in his life, made it sound quite cool and fun, but this time he really opened up and related how he'd often been forced to do sexual favours for cash and then how he'd repeatedly been sexually assaulted while he was in prison, so he hadn't really been surprised when the doctor told him about his suspicions. That had been the reason he hadn't really wanted to go see the doctor in the first place.

Both Marty and Myra were rather drunk when Ricky finally came home very late that night. As usual, the two brothers greeted each other rather coldly, and as he sat down next to Myra on the sofa, Ricky hinted quite openly that it probably was time for Marty to leave. Myra however surprised him by saying that Marty would be staying the night, as he needed to be somewhere where he felt safe and loved.

Marty looked at her gratefully and sighed before he told his brother the news. Neither Myra nor Marty had been expecting him to burst into tears and hug his brother but both were still taken aback by his reactions as he'd quietly stood up and, without saying a word, took his jacket and left the flat.

And it wasn't before Myra heard the door shut that she was reminded of her own problems, and this time it was her time to cry in Marty's arms.


	18. Chapter 18

**18) The BitterSweet Time**

Ricky didn't return to Myra's flat the next day or the day after; in fact he didn't return at all. It was as if the earth had swallowed him. Little by little Myra got over the heartbreak but she always felt sorry she hadn't been able to tell him about the pregnancy. Marty didn't hear from his brother either. He hadn't been on speaking terms with his parents since they'd thrown him out years before, and Donny and the other friends he and Ricky shared claimed they hadn't heard anything from him since that night.

The tests Marty's doctors conducted confirmed their fears and the shock seemed to weaken his immune system, as it was only a month later that his health took a sudden turn for the worse and he was forced to tell his flatmates about his condition. The flatmates who weren't really his friends felt insecure about sharing a kitchen and bathroom with a man with AIDS and made it clear they expected him to move out. He didn't have the energy to put up any fight and just packed his things and left the flat.

Myra who had got used to spending most nights with her friend, was rather surprised when he didn't turn up at her place that same night but assumed he didn't feel well and had just decided to stay in. When he hadn't visited her in three days, she tried to ring his flat, but no one replied so she called Paul and asked him to babysit for a bit, while she'd go and check up on him. At the flat, no one answered the door, but when she was just about to leave, one of Marty's flatmates arrived home and told her he'd moved out a few days before.

Marty had told her about some of the places he'd crashed back when he was homeless so she decided to check some of them to see whether he'd gone back to his old lifestyle. It was the middle of the night, she'd been out for over five hours and was just about to give up, leaving an old warehouse, when she finally ran into him as he was entering the building. She took him in her arms and led him away until she found a cab to take them home to hers.

When they arrived at Myra's place, Paul was already asleep on the sofa so Myra told Marty to take a bath and while he was in the shower, she arranged for him to sleep in her bed and that's where he would sleep for the next two and a half years.

In Myra's care, Marty's health soon stabilised and as the weeks and then the months went by, they struck up a strange but rewarding partnership. He was her rock throughout her fourth pregnancy, and it was he who laughed at her when she named the little girl Caroline Melanie and asked whether he could take look at the little 'caramel'. Jacqui picked up that name right away and ever since then the beautiful blond girl had been called Carmel.

The girls, in particular Jacqui, blossomed with Marty in the household. Mercedes was a little more apprehensive at first, but she soon started to seek solace in his calm presence and would often crawl up into his lap just to fall asleep. And Myra herself would always wish that what she had those precious two and a half years would never have been taken away from her.


	19. Chapter 19

**19) A Downhill Slope**

It was a few weeks before Carmel's first birthday that Myra started noticing how Marty suddenly seemed to be bumping into things all the time. At first she thought it was only clumsiness but when he placed one of Carmel's birthday cakes on the edge of the table so that it tipped over and splattered all over the floor, she realised that something must be seriously wrong. The following day, she managed to persuade him to see his doctor at the hospital and knowing his fear of what could be happening, she went with him. Marty admitted to the doctor that his eyesight seemed to be changing so the doctor called a specialist to check his eyes.

Meanwhile, Myra was sitting in the waiting room getting more worried with every minute and when she was called into the doctor's office she was already shaking. The specialist then told them that Marty's eyesight was receding and that it would probably get worse in the next few months and that he would eventually be blind.

Neither Myra nor Marty had expected this news and they walked arm in arm in complete silence all the way home from the hospital. At home, Myra immediately started rearranging the flat so that it would be easier for Marty to get around and so that he'd get to know the flat completely while he still could see anything. Three weeks later, Marty woke up around nine o'clock in the morning and opened his eyes to an almost complete darkness. Myra who was in the kitchen, giving the three oldest girls breakfast, dropped the packet of cornflakes so that it scattered all over, when she heard the cry from the bedroom.

From that day, Marty's health deteriorated from day to day and he just seemed to waste away before Myra's eyes. Some days he was fine, but he seemed to catch every single illness that went around. He was taken to hospital a few times, twice with pneumonia, once because of severe diarrhea and then Myra had noticed purple spots popping up, first on his neck and she teased him about having a hickie. When the spot didn't go away within a few days and another one turned up on his right leg, she took him to the doctor who told them they were a type of skin cancer called Kaposi's sarcoma. Just the name had been enough to make Myra paralysed in her chair.

But no matter how ill Marty'd become, he always seemed to bounce back and within a few days he'd be back at home, trying his best to play with the girls.

At the time, Jacqui was old enough to understand that 'uncle Marty' was seriously ill and she tried to help out as much as she could to make his last days as comfortable as they all could. Mercedes on the other hand, missed lying with him in the sofa watching telly as he now mostly stayed in bed, sweating yet shivering, and had just stayed away, looking sadder than anyone had ever seen her.


	20. Chapter 20

**20) A Blast From The Past**

Martin Boalin, 'Uncle Marty', passed away in hospital five days after his beloved Caramel's second birthday. At Myra's insistence he'd stayed at home until the morning after the birthday party. When he woke up that morning, he had problems breathing and had not been able to breath without the help of a respirator. Myra's mum took the girls and Myra stayed with him at the hospital until the moment when he smiled at her softly before falling asleep for the last time.

At Marty's funeral, Myra just sat herself down together with Jacqui, Donny, Paul and her parents on the front bench on the left side of the coffin, when a group of three people came storming up the aisle and sat on the front bench to the right. Looking over in their direction, she was only able to see the nearest person, a gray-haired middle-aged lady who looked coldly at the coffin.

The service was beautiful, the priest gave a beautiful eulogy and an old friend, a boyfriend Marty'd had when he was seventeen and kept contact with through the years, read a poem Marty'd written for him when they'd been going out. But it was Marty's special request that _The Power of Love _by Frankie Goes To Hollywood should be played at the end of the service that finally pushed Myra over the edge and she just sat there weeping in Donny's arms as the other people rose to follow the coffin out of the church.

It wasn't until she reached the graveyard where the small crowd was gathered around Marty's grave that she noticed Ricky there, stood next to the grim-looking woman whom Myra'd seen in the church, and she realised that Marty's family, who couldn't stand the sight of him while he was alive, had had the nerve to show up at his funeral.

The McQueen's had arranged that Marty's closest friends should all meet up for drinks down Myra's local pub after the service, and it was Donny who persuaded Ricky to join them there, much to Myra's dismay. In the pub, Ricky sat as far away from Myra as he could, but as the group started thinning out, the two of them had been forced to look each other in the eye and Myra realised that he was genuinely grieving for his brother whom he hadn't seen in the last two and a half years.

A few minutes later, the two of them started talking. Ricky told her how sorry he was for being such a prick and after telling her that he'd been in prison again a few times since the last time they saw one another, it was finally Myra's turn to tell him that he had a two year old daughter.


	21. Chapter 21

**21) Daddy's Back**

Little Carmel stole Ricky's heart right away and he was really devastated by how his own reactions to his brother's decease had deprived him of seeing his own daughter grow up from being a beautiful little baby to the golden haired toddler that had smiled and wobbled to him the moment she laid eyes on him. He'd then told Myra proudly that she instinctively must know who her daddy was, but that moment was ruined when Tina'd come running towards him, shouting 'Matty! Matty!', and he'd realised that it was his brother who really had been Carmel's daddy for those first years of her life. So Ricky decided there and then that he'd better start behaving like a real father to his daughter.

Myra wasn't over the moon to have Ricky back in her life, but she respected his rights as Carmel's father and understood how he was trying to make up for the way he'd treated her and Marty. He even made an effort to get closer to Myra's other daughters.

She still missed Marty more than she'd have thought possible, even more than she'd missed Michael after he died. It was a different kind of regret, however. Michael had been her first love and lover, but Marty had been a friend, a real equal and a partner, even through his illness. So having Ricky back felt kind of like Marty was still there, especially when she saw his tall, blond figure approaching her home, but in a way it also made her miss her friend all the more.

One day, a month after Marty's funeral, Myra was called into a meeting with Jacqui's teacher. Her eldest daughter was doing rather well with the school work as such; learning didn't seem to be any problem for her. On the contrary, it seemed to come so easy to her that she was getting kind of bored at school and had started acting up, and the teacher was always contacting Myra, claiming Jacqui was leading three boys in her class astray, creating constant trouble, both in the class room and on the school ground. The reason for this meeting was that they were suspected of having stolen things from their school mates' coats and jackets.

Myra felt very patronised at the meeting and told the teacher, she'd talk to Jacqui and get to the bottom of things. On their way home from school, she asked her oldest daughter whether this was true and she finally told her that they'd taken two pounds from one girl's coat and a five pound note from somebody else's jacket, because they'd wanted to by some chocolate. All the way home, Mercedes, who'd also started school, kept giving her older sister dirty looks and acted all high and mighty. Still, Myra didn't have the energy to tell either one of her daughters off, she was too preoccupied with the realisation of how her financial difficulties were affecting her daughters.

When she came home, the mail had arrived and she picked it up and put it on her kitchen table. At first, she thought she wasn't in the mood to open any of it as it only seemed to be 'Bills! Bills! Bills!', but thinking to herself that she might as well get it over and done with, she sighed and sat down at the table with a cup of tea.

Half an hour later, Ricky arrived at her house and Mercy opened the door to let him in. When he asked where Myra was, Mercy only pointed to her mother's bedroom and then gone into her own room to continue combing the hair of her only barbie doll. When Ricky entered the bedroom, he saw Myra lying in her bed sobbing and as he walked slowly towards her, he asked kindly what was wrong. She didn't reply, and instead she simply handed him a letter, addressed to Mr Martin Boalin. It was his benefits check.

Looking up at Ricky, Myra then whispered, "They don't even know he's dead!", before she burst into tears again. Taking her into his arms, Ricky tried his best to sooth her pain and sorrow, and he told her he'd deal with it so there wouldn't be any more letters like this. Hearing this, Myra finally stopped crying and just held on to Ricky and looked into his eyes – the eyes that reminded her so much of her best friend – and before she knew it, they were kissing and tearing at each other's clothes.


	22. Chapter 22

**22) Supporting A Family**

After this moment of passion, Myra and Ricky slowly become close again, and after a while, Myra actually started to see a possible future together with him. He didn't moved in right away, but his visits got more frequent and he'd stay over most nights. The girls seemed to like him as well, apart from Jacqui who remembered how distant he'd always been the first time around. Not surprisingly, the strongest bond was between Ricky and little Carmel whom he paraded around the neighbourhood, telling everyone who'd listen how beautiful his little girl was.

A few months into their relationship, Myra realised the inevitable – she was pregnant for the fifth time! Seeing how happy Ricky was about his daughter, Myra decided to tell him right away, and for once, his reactions didn't surprise her. He grabbed her into his arms and swung her around the kitchen, singing "I'm gonna be a dad again! I'm gonna be a dad again!" over and over.

Myra was not as overwhelmed with joy. Money had always been tight, and one more child would not make life in her household any easier. Still, she didn't want to ruin the moment, so she decided to leave that discussion for later. That discussion, however, turned out not to be necessary as Ricky told her two days later that he'd found a job, a job that paid more than twice what he'd been getting on the dole and he was to start right away. Naturally, Myra was overjoyed at the news and she was finally able to envisage a future where she wouldn't need to count and watch every single penny.

With the financial problems out of the way, Jacqui and Mercedes both seemed to have a much better time at school. The phone calls from Jacqui's teacher became less frequent and Mercy could finally get some of the fashionable clothes she'd been begging about ever since she'd started school.

Myra also enjoyed a much easier pregnancy than ever before, and she thought it was mainly due to not having any financial worries for the first time since she'd been widowed as a teenager. Still, she noticed that there were some physical differences between this pregnancy and the previous ones, both how she never felt any nausea this time, and when her belly had started growing she was certain that it was differently shaped than before, that it was somehow sticking more forward than she was used to. When she mentioned it to her mum, her mum just laughed and told her she'd find out when he was born.

On what would have been Marty's twenty-sixth birthday, Myra gave birth to a beautiful baby boy who had his father's golden hair and his mother's eyes and nose. When she looked at him for the first time with pride and joy, Myra was certain she could feel the presence of her beloved friend. And as she felt the love and regret, a single tear trickled down her right cheek.


	23. Chapter 23

**23) The Bubble Bursts**

Myra and Ricky had their first big fight when they were discussing names for their son. She told him she wanted to name her son Martin after his brother, but he simply told her "No!", that no son of his would be named after a poof, even if he'd been his brother. This, of course, caused Myra to explode in defense of Marty, and even harsher words were spoken. After they quieted down a little, Myra suggested 'Michael' but Ricky also vetoed that name. She then blankly refused to honour his father because of how his family'd treated Marty. After a hell of a lot more shouting, they finally settled on John Paul after her father and her favourite brother.

All the while, Mercedes had been sitting in the room, scared of what would come out of this fight. She'd never before heard anyone say anything negative about uncle Marty, but she understood from her stepfather's words that being queer or a poof was something terrible, something that would only result in terrible things, such as getting AIDS and dying.

Myra had always known how different the two brothers were, but that fight forced her to admit to herself that her relationship with Ricky was mostly based on her love for his brother and that she was trying to recreate what she'd had with him. Still, she tried to keep things going, if not for her or their sake, then for the sake of her children. At that moment, she was just not able to see herself taking care of five children by herself.

In many ways, Ricky was proving to be a model partner. He worked reasonable hours, had a regular income and helped her with the children to a certain extent. He loved taking Carmel and John Paul for a walk, and if that meant taking Tina as well, he willingly did that. This gave Myra some time to herself once in a while, and she always used those precious minutes as well as she could.

For some reason, Ricky had never formally moved in with Myra. This didn't really bother her much as it would only have caused problems with the social services. Still, she'd mentioned it a few times whether it wouldn't be the right thing to do, but he'd always brushed the topic aside and said he liked things as they were, at least the idea of having his own place, even if he hardly ever went there. Then one day, the real reason behind his reluctance became clear to her.

Ricky had left for work at the normal time, walking Jacqui, Mercy and Tina to school as usual. Myra had been going about her normal business, giving Carmel her breakfast and was breastfeeding John Paul, when she heard the doorbell. Outside her door she saw an unfamiliar middle-aged man who then introduced himself as Mr Rogers from the social services. He then asked to see Mr Boalin to which Myra replied that he'd already gone to work. This seemed to surprise Mr Rogers greatly, who then asked whether Mr Boalin's health now allowed him to work. Myra was obviously taken aback by this question and told him that Ricky's health was just fine, to which Mr Rogers told her he'd meant Mr Martin Boalin.

Finding out that Ricky'd never told the social services that Marty was dead, and that he'd been claiming Marty's benefits all this time, Myra's bubble finally burst and she realised that she could never be with a man who'd use his own dead brother for his own financial gain, so when he came home from his supposed work that evening, she calmly told him to pack his things because she never ever wanted to see him again.

Two days later she found out that she was pregnant once again.


	24. Chapter 24

**24) Five In One Bed**

Two months after Ricky left - well, after she threw him out - Myra was forced to admit to herself that she couldn't make ends meet with only the benefit payments. She was doing her shopping at the local supermarket and was about to write a cheque when the shop assistant told her she wasn't allowed to take more cheques from her as the last three cheques had all bounced. Feeling humiliated beyond belief, Myra just left the shopping bags where they were on the floor and walked directly home, dragging and shouting at a reluctant Carmel behind her while pushing John Paul's buggy.

After a few minutes of crying in her kitchen, Myra came to a conclusion and when the three oldest girls came home from school, she told Jacqui that she would have to look after her siblings for two hours while she went out to look for a job. She knew that she couldn't officially get a job, as the pay wouldn't be better than the benefits so she had to look for someone who was willing to pay her under the table. She started by going to the off-licence next door, but the owner had enough staff, with his three sons manning most shifts.

After hearing different variants of that same story, wherever she went, Myra finally gave up and decided to have one pint in the pub. As she sat herself on a stool at the bar, she couldn't but notice the manager slamming the receiver down on the phone, shouting abusives at the person on the other end. He was still muttering to himself when he reached where Myra was sitting and she heard him complaining that now he would have to clean the place himself that night. Realising right away that this was her chance, she asked if he needed a cleaner and a couple of minutes later she could make a toast to herself, celebrating her new job which she was supposed to start right away, meaning she'd have to come in at closing time as the pub opened at eight in the morning.

Twenty minutes later, she was home in her flat and sat Jacqui down for a chat. From now on, Jacqui would have to sleep in Myra's bed, in case her brother or sisters woke up after Myra left for work. Myra couldn't, of course, take her children with her to work in the middle of the night, even if she'd want to, and she couldn't ask Paul who now had a family of his own. Also, Shirley had moved to Manchester with her new bloke, so she was out of the question, too.

Upon hearing this, Jacqui just nodded seriously and then gave her mum a hug. It broke Myra's heart to have to put this responsibility on her eldest daughter's shoulders, but she also knew that Jacqui was an unusually responsible nine year old, at least when it came to her siblings. She'd repeatedly had to step in and protect Tina from kids who'd been calling her names or worse, because of her being different from her sisters, and Myra couldn't count how many times she'd been called to meetings at the school because of Jacqui's over-protectiveness for her sister. Now, she was forced to rely on exactly that same over-protectiveness, but she didn't see any other way out. Later that night, as she was leaving for work, she checked one last time in her bedroom where her oldest daughter was sleeping soundly in the big bed. Seeing the innocence in Jacqui's face, Myra had to wipe a single tear of her cheek.

When she returned home two hours later, she found all five children sleeping in their mother's bed and she couldn't help but smile at this beautiful sight and just stood there in the doorway, watching them for a few minutes, before she finally turned to pick up the mattress from Jacqui's bed.


	25. Chapter 25

**25) A Whale Of A Time**

The last months of Myra's pregnancy were very difficult and she knew in her heart that this would be the last time she'd ever get pregnant. Even if she was only 26 years old, she could feel that she wasn't as fit as she had been the previous times; she'd never really managed to lose the weight she'd put on during the last two times, and she felt just like a balloon after only six months. Also, having to go to work this time, even if only for a few hours every night, was extremely tiring. She still had to wake up early every morning to get Jacqui, Mercy and Tina ready for school, having only slept a few hours herself, and then she had to entertain Carmel and keep a constant eye on little John Paul who loved 'running' around in his walker, and especially bumping into furniture – Myra was certain it was only a question of time before the telly would fall down on her only son. She normally managed to get a couple of hours' nap with her two youngest, before Jacqui and the others would come home from school, and then Jacqui would take all of them out to the park so that Myra could try and get some more rest – in her own bed, as she still slept most nights on the floor, on Jacqui's mattress.

During those months after Ricky was gone, Jacqui's schoolwork, which had been improving, started to suffer again and the phone calls from school got more frequent again. It wasn't her behaviour that was worrying her teacher this time, it was more her absentmindedness. She hardly ever did her homework and was constantly falling asleep on her desk. Still, all this wasn't Miss Harris' main worry. No, it was Jacqui's serious demeanour; this girl who'd always been the bombastic leader of the trouble-makers now had black circles under her eyes and she spent most of her breaks checking up on her younger sisters, especially Tina, making sure everything was alright.

Of course, Myra knew what was happening, but she didn't see what else she could do. There was no way she could afford a babysitter and her mum had been poorly lately and couldn't help as much as she wanted to. Still, she had promised to move in with them for a week or two after the baby would be born. The day that Myra was supposed to give birth came and went, and so did six more days, but still, the doctor didn't want to do anything about it and was certain the baby would come within too long.

When eight days had passed since her scheduled day, Myra's mum decided to move in, even if the baby wasn't there. It was a Sunday afternoon when she arrived at the flat, she put her things in Jacqui's room where she was supposed to sleep and then went into the kitchen to get herself a cup of tea. It was like Myra's body had been waiting for this chance to let go, because no sooner had see heard the water start filling the kettle in her mum's hand, than she felt the first pain in her abdomen – finally it was time.

Eight hours later, one more baby girl lay in her arms, looking so much like her father with her big eyes and thick golden hair. The next day, she reluctantly allowed Ricky to see his baby daughter for a few minutes and she knew he'd get the hint when she introduced him to little Michaela Martine McQueen.


	26. Chapter 26

**26) Sticks And Stones**

In spite of the remarkably different personalities, Myra could somehow see parts of herself in all her three oldest daughters, and she was certain that she'd also come to recognise some similarities as the youngest ones would get older.

Jacqui had certainly inherited her courage and her sense of family responsibility. Maybe she hadn't really volunteered to look after her siblings, but the fact she hadn't run away from it, said it all.

Like Myra, Mercedes had always been good at making friends and she'd been the most popular girl in her class ever since the first day at school.

However, it was Tina who Myra identified with the most.

Like Myra, Tina had always loved school, even if she often had a hard time with kids who teased her for being different. To Tina, the joy of learning had always made up for all the taunts and the harsh words from ignorant children who couldn't see past the fact that her colour of skin being different from her older sisters. As a child, Myra had sometimes been teased by her less-achieving classmates, but she had always been able to give back one better, and they'd soon learned not to mess with her. Sadly, Tina had not inherited her mum's sassiness and even if she tried to put on a brave face, the words always hurt.

Jacqui tried her best to look after her little sister and she couldn't count how many times she'd had to give someone a taste of their own medicine. Still, things hadn't changed much for the better for Tina and with Jacqui more and more busy with the youngest ones, things soon started turning worse.

To some extent, Myra had been aware of those taunts since they'd started, and she'd repeatedly been in touch with Tina's teacher to try and put an end to this. In spite of that, she'd never expected that things could go so wrong.

It was the day after Michaela started teething. She'd been up crying all night and neither Myra nor Jacqui had slept a wink so Myra phoned the school and told them that Jacqui was a bit under the weather. This meant that Mercedes and Tina had to walk to school by themselves and then were supposed to walk back home together. But when one of her classmates asked her to come to her place after school, Mercy completely forgot about it and went off with her.

Tina didn't return home that afternoon which worried Jacqui right away, but Myra who hadn't really been told the extend of Tina's hassles, didn't start to get worried until two hours had passed. She then left John Paul and Carmel with Jacqui and went out to look for her daughter and after forty-five minutes, she found her hiding behind a shed near the school. Tina's lower lib was cut, her nose was bleeding, her left eye was swollen and she had a big cut on her forehead. Her school uniform was also torn and after Myra had held her sobbing in her arms trying to sooth her for what seemed like forever, she told her that two boys in Mercy's class had attacked her, one of them hitting her with a stick with a small nail at the end.

Tina stayed home for a week after the attack. When she finally went back to school, Myra insisted that the parents of both boys would be there with their sons. She decided not to press charges, but she wanted them and everyone in Tina's class to know that no one could ever hurt her daughter again – or they'd have her on their case. After this confrontation, Tina was never bullied by her schoolmates again and Myra was always convinced it was because of her actions. After all, she never heard anything about Jacqui and her mates beating the crap out of the two boys the following day.


	27. Chapter 27

**27) Sunny With Clouds**

When Myra's ray of sunshine, Carmel, started school, both Myra and Mr Lewis, Carmel's teacher, noticed quite early on that something was amiss. Where Jacqui, Mercedes and Tina all had been fast learners from the start, Carmel was experiencing real problems with the letters. Some of them, like her own letter _C_ she could learn right away but some of the others, like _d_ and _b_ she just couldn't differentiate between.

Her main problem appeared when the class started reading words and sentences, then the letters just started dancing like ants around the page. The same seemed to be happening to the numbers when they were doing math; she couldn't really see the difference between _6_ and _9_, and the numbers just seemed to jump back and forwards around each other as well as the plus- and minus-signs.

To begin with, this didn't really bother Carmel herself – in fact, all this action she could see on the paper seemed to amuse her, and during most lessons she'd just be giggling to herself as the other kids tried their best to work.

After only a few weeks, Mr Lewis invited Myra to a meeting where he told her that he was worried that Caroline Melanie might be dyslexic and that he needed Myra's accept so that the school's special teacher could test her daughter. Myra obviously signed the necessary forms right away and expected the situation to be cleared up within a few weeks.

Unfortunately, there was a long waiting list as more and more pupils were being tested for different sorts of learning difficulties and Myra hadn't known that there was a backlog of cases from the previous years. In the meantime, Carmel's problems became even more pronounced as the weeks and then months went by, and by Easter, she had yet to see the specialist.

With time, Carmel herself also started realising that she wasn't learning as much as her classmates, and little by little this realisation began filling her with insecurities and impatience at school.

This change in her daughter didn't go unnoticed by Myra, but she was trying to be patient with the school after finding out that the school was severly understaffed when it came to special education, and therefore she'd decided to just wait until it finally would be their turn. However, when Carmel began complaining about stomach pains and headaches in the mornings – illnesses that would miraculously disappear when her mum had phoned her in sick – Myra's patience started to wear thin.

One morning in mid-May, the normally cheerful Carmel threw her first ever tantrum and just cried and refused to go to school. This was the final straw for Myra. That morning, she put Michaela in the buggy she'd used for all her children, sat John Paul on top of it and then stormed to school with the other four daughters towing behind her. She went straight to the headmaster's office and insisted that Mr Lewis would come there as well. Then she told both of them that she wouldn't leave the building before Carmel would see the special teacher so that her problems could be dealt with accordingly. Two and a half hour later, Carmel had her first meeting with the special teacher.


	28. Chapter 28

**28) A Very Special Offer**

A few days after Michaela's first birthday, Lenny, the manager of the pub where Myra had been cleaning for the past eighteen months, asked her whether she was interested in more hours, not cleaning but tending the bar. She accepted the job right away, as this both meant more money and that she wouldn't have to work after midnight any more. Unfortunately, this also meant that Myra would have to put even more responsibility on her oldest daughter's shoulders.

Lenny knew everything about Myra's situation and he organised her shifts so that she never had to come in before Jacqui was home from school. With Myra working most afternoons and evenings, it was now up to Jacqui to prepare dinner for her sisters and brother, and she soon started to be in charge of the shopping. Twice a week she'd get Michaela and John Paul dressed and then she'd put them both in the buggy and off she'd go to the supermarket, usually with only Carmel and Tina following closely behind her as Mercedes would most days be hanging out with her friends after school.

When they came home from the shops one day, Jacqui found a packet of biscuits in the buggy as she picked up John Paul and a few days later she noticed him leaning over to grab a bar of chocolate from a shelf and then sticking it underneath his blanket.

Even with Myra working more hours, money was still tight and Jacqui often had to deny herself and her siblings things they all were craving. But seeing how easily her brother seemed to be hiding things in the buggy gave Jacqui an idea how the family could allow themselves more and the next time they' went to the supermarket, she decided to try something similar herself. It would have to be something small, or at least thin, so that it could easily be slipped underneath the blanket. Walking around the supermarket, she tried not to look suspicious as she looked for the perfect item. When she came to the meat coolers, she knew right away what it would be – a packet of sliced bacon.

The entire family loved egg and bacon for breakfast, but Myra would only allow herself to cook it once a week, actually for health reasons rather than because of the price. Standing there looking at the bacon, Jacqui decided that she'd do egg and bacon for dinner that night – her mum would never find out – so she took two packages as if to inspect the price and swiftly stuck one of them in the buggy, underneath Michaela, as she put the other one back in the cooler.

After this first package of bacon, Jacqui became little by little more daring in her shopping for free things – sometimes she'd take a few chocolate bars to share with her siblings, other times it would be meat, cheese or smoked salmon to name but a few things, but her grandest achievement must have been when she, two days before Christmas a couple of years later, hid a frozen turkey next to Michaela, who at three was still being pushed around in her buggy.

Myra would have had to be blind not to notice how Jacqui somehow managed to buy much more for the money she was given than Myra'd ever been able to, but things were good and deep down she knew that she didn't really want to know all the details about Jacqui's idea of home economy. However, when she came home from work that night, she also knew that she couldn't just ignore the turkey she saw in the fridge. But when she asked her daughter how she could afford the turkey, Jacqui'd just smiled slyly and walked away, muttering "It was a very special offer!"


	29. Chapter 29

**29) Ginger Snaps I**

Myra hadn't really met any men since she'd got rid of Ricky, but that all changed when she started pulling pints. Just standing behind the bar seemed to make her all the more attractive to most male punters, single or married, and just the first week on the job, she had more offers for casual encounters of the sexual kind than she could count on both hands and feet. She enjoyed the attention and the banter, but if truth should be told, she wasn't vaguely interested in any of them. Experience had also taught her what one night stands were likely to bring with them, so she wisely never accepted any of the offers.

That is, until a Tuesday afternoon, two weeks into the new year, when she was alone in the bar. She was changing an empty vodka bottle when she heard someone come in. She finished putting the new bottle in place before she turned and when she finally was done she was startled by the sight of an extremely strong-looking chest directly in her eye level. She slowly tilted back her head to look up and was immediately charmed by the tall ginger haired man smiling down at her.

It was a quiet afternoon in the pub and during the next hour, Myra found out that his name was Andrew, he was a divorced thirty-three year old banker who'd just started working in the local bank. He didn't stay long that day, but then he was back the following day and two days later, and then again, the next Monday.

After Andrew had been coming down the pub almost every day for over a month, he finally asked her to join him for dinner one night. The following Thursday was Myra's day off so she took her kids down to the local high street where she looked into a few shops. In one of them, she tried on a simple black dress that became her perfectly, but she sadly had to give it back when she saw the price tag. Dispirited, she went home and looked at her old dresses, the last of which she'd bought just after John Paul was born. She tried on a few of them, and ended up settling on the only one that didn't feel far too tight, an out-of-style bottle green number, which still showed off her boobs quite nicely.

While Myra was in her room trying on her old dresses, Jacqui ran out, leaving Tina in charge of Carmel, John Paul and Michaela. Just as Myra was reluctantly making up her mind on which dress she'd wear, John Paul had fallen head first off a chair in the kitchen and was howling for his mum. Myra ran to the kitchen right away and tried to console her only son. She was still sitting with him in her lap, her dress all stained from his tears, when Jacqui quietly entered the flat half an hour later.

Seeing the angry expression on her mum's face, Jacqui tried to explain why she'd run out like that but Myra was having none of it. She'd told her eldest daughter that she needed to be able to trust her with the younger ones and she couldn't just go AWOL, leaving Tina in charge.

Jacqui knew her mum well enough to know that she would never get a word in when she was angry like that. She also knew that Myra's anger would evaporate as quickly as it appeared, so she just calmly sat down at the kitchen table and waited for her mum to finish mouthing off. When Myra'd finally quieted down, Jacqui calmly picked up her bag from the floor, and she smiled softly at her mum as she opened it to reveal the black dress Myra'd wanted so much.


	30. Chapter 30

**30) Ginger Snaps II**

Just under three hours later, Myra entered the minicab that was waiting outside her house, wearing the black dress and a wistful smile on her face. She hadn't been able to send her daughter back with the dress. She knew of course that Jacqui hadn't bought it, but just one night, she wanted to feel special, so she'd decided to follow Cinderella's example; to allow herself to enjoy the night and just deal with the consequences later.

She realised that she couldn't of course take the dress back the following day, so she wouldn't really be able to set a good example for her children. Still, she knew she'd soon have to have a serious talk with them, and especially her oldest daughter, about shoplifting. A talk she was not looking forward to, especially since it would reveal her own passive involvement. But for now, she managed to push those thoughts aside and the rest of the cab-ride, she concentrated her thoughts on her date the evening.

The date went beautifully. Andrew was utterly charming, a real gentleman who managed to both make Myra laugh and feel very special, and the dress had been exactly the right thing for the fancy restaurant he'd taken her to. She couldn't help but feel guilty for how happy she was that Jacqui'd taken control of the situation and saved her from that awful green frock.

Andrew also seemed to be equally impressed by Myra's wit and surprising intellect and kept coming back to the pub after work whenever she would be working. A couple of weeks later, he took her to another restaurant, and love seemed to be blossoming, so Myra decided to invite him over to her place the following Saturday so he could meet her children for the first time, and she arranged with Lenny to have that day off.

Myra didn't sleep much that Saturday morning. He knew she had children, but she was anxious as to how he'd react when he found out there were six of them. Still, she felt rather sure that he'd welcome them with open arms, as he'd often mentioned that not having been able to have children had been the main reason for the friction in his marriage.

In the afternoon, just before Andrew was due, Myra sent Jacqui out with her sisters. John Paul had a cold that day, so she decided to keep him indoors and he was playing in the living room when Andrew arrived. The two boys hit it off right away. Myra'd often seen how different John Paul seemed to be when there were men around, how he seemed to come alive whenever he could play "boys' games". He especially loved to play footie with his uncle Paul and cousins Terry and Phil, and Myra'd often felt that John Paul was the child who missed out the most on Ricky's absence. Seeing him with Andrew just strengthened that feeling and she just hoped that this relationship would last longer than her previous one.

Andrew seemed to be equally impressed by John Paul, and she could just see his daddy-instincts kicking in. When the girls returned to the flat, the eight of them had a great time until late that night. That's why Myra was so shocked, hurt and surprised when Andrew phoned her the following day and told her he couldn't be with her anymore – he couldn't deal with so many children. And she never saw him in the pub again.


	31. Chapter 31

**31) Falling Off And Jumping On A Wagon**

Andrew's strange and surprising disappearance made Myra even more wary of the men she met in the pub. Funnily though, this increased cynicism made her even more popular with the punters and she'd normally receive a couple of drunken marriage proposals every night.

Myra had never really had much to drink when she was working but now she started having a few with the regulars and little by little those few drinks became quite a few ones and four months after her hopes with Andrew had been shattered like that, most of her nights at work would end with a lock-in. Still, it wasn't until that awful morning when she wasn't able to get up to get the girls ready for school that she realised what was happening.

Thinking about it long and hard, she then had to admit to herself that deep down she'd been blaming her kids for Andrew's decision, especially her daughters. Coming to this realisation felt like being hit in her sore head with a wet towel. Her children had always been her pride and joy, and she loved them more than anything in the world. Sure, her life hadn't been what she'd expected since she had them, but lying there in her bed with severe hangovers that morning, she was forced to ask herself whether she'd change any of it. And she found the answer really surprised herself.

Somehow, life had just happened to her, taken control ever since she'd met Michael on her sixteenth birthday. Since then, she'd experienced much heartache, both with losing Michael and then Marty, the fall-out with Michael's parents and later being devastated by Ricky's unforgivable betrayal. But the joys and rewards were just so much more important; those few months of utter happiness with Michael and later with Marty, not to mention the constant love and adoration she felt from her children.

So as Myra crawled out of bed and stumbled into the kitchen to prepare a cup of coffee and get some painkillers, she decided she'd need to try and make it up to her children for how she'd withdrawn from them in the past few months. And she'd start with John Paul.

Andrew's moment with John Paul may have been what hurt her the most. As the only girl in a group of seven siblings, Myra knew how difficult that had been, and she'd had her mother to do girly things with, so she understood the joy in her son's eyes as he played with another boy, even if that boy was almost thirty years older, and she found it important that he should spend more time with other boys before he'd start school, even if that was over a year away. Sure, Jacqui and Tina would often kick a ball with him, but neither girl's heart was really in it, and they'd always let him win, and Myra knew he'd have to play against his peers so that he'd match his mates at school when the time came.

Apart from Paul, she'd never been particularly close to her brothers, but there and then she knew it was the right moment to ask her brothers for a favour so she picked up the phone and rang her eldest brother Tommy. After a few harsh words and a bit of begging from Myra, Tommy finally agreed to organise a boys' only Sunday for all the cousins to get to know each other and play football.

Myra knew that she'd been right when, already the first Sunday. John Paul came back home beaming with happiness and pride for having been able to outplay his one year older cousin Gary. And Myra didn't find out until three years later that Donny almost always took his old mate Ricky Boalin along with him and had him sit on a bench in the distance so that he could watch his only son play.


	32. Chapter 32

**32) "Let's Swap!"**

Even if more than three years had passed by since Ricky left, there was one member of Myra's family who simply hadn't been able to forget him. It wasn't that she'd been missing Ricky as a step-dad, he hadn't really been all that great and she hadn't really liked him that much either, but still, Mercedes often thought about how easy life had been when he was around. Back then, her mum didn't have to work and they'd been able to buy Mercedes some of the clothes and other things she'd really fancied, and she'd really loved having as nice things as her classmates.

She hadn't realised right away, how Ricky's departure from her life would change things for the worse, not until a few months afterwards when she'd asked her mum for the latest fashion item, a pink schoolbag with a big red heart on the front, and her mum had told her she couldn't afford it, and she'd have to make do with her old one.

To begin with, Mercedes had tried everything she could think off to get her mum to change her mind; she'd thrown a few tantrums, locked herself in her room for a whole day, nagged, begged and pleaded, but finally when she'd realised that it was no use, she'd decided to just accept the situation.

That is until one Friday afternoon when she was at her friend Carly's house.

Carly was an only child, and although her parents weren't rich, they always seemed to have enough money to get her everything she wanted. Oh, how Mercy wanted to be in her situation, and she often thought that she'd sell each one of her siblings just for a pair of ear-rings or new jeans.

Looking around Carly's room, an idea suddenly came to her. She'd simply borrow Carly's things, she definitely had enough and would surely be willing to swap things. The problem was just that Mercedes didn't really have much to offer her in return, but she still went ahead and asked whether she could borrow Carly's new baby blue top for the weekend, which Carly agreed to right away.

As the weeks and then months went by, Mercy borrowed more and more things from Carly but returned only a few of them, so that her closets and drawers were filling up. Myra of course noticed this early on, and asked her daughter where she'd got all those things, and Mercy told her the truth, that she'd borrowed them from Carly. Myra then asked what Carly was getting in return, and Mercedes had to think quickly and told her that Carly was really regretting that she was an only child, so Mercy often allowed her to be in charge when they were babysitting John Paul and Michaela, which Myra accepted as a plausible enough explanation.

Not surprisingly, this one-sided swapping had with time begun to irritate Carly, and one day she simply put her foot down and said no to Mercedes when she asked to borrow her CD-player. This resulted in a huge fight between the two girls and Mercy stormed out and vowed never to speak with Carly ever again. Carly who was in tears after the fight, told her mum everything and her mum in return phoned Myra, so by the time Mercy came home, Myra'd already sent Jacqui out with the other children and was sitting in the kitchen waiting for her.

Mercedes had seen her mother angry quite a few times, but never before had that anger been directed at her, and she'd never felt as small as she felt that day sitting at the kitchen table listening to her mother's words about friendship; that friends should never be taken advantage off and that even if Carly was lucky enough to have a lot of nice things, and was willing to lend her some of them from time to time, that didn't mean that Mercy could just keep them for herself as if they were her own. That would be the same as stealing, and her mother's words "You never steal from your friends!" would be imprinted in Mercedes for the rest of her life, and she'd never 'borrow' things from Carly or other friends again.

What Myra failed to realise, was that even if Mercedes took full notice of her words that day, she also understood that her mother hadn't completely forbidden her to steal, only from friends, so the next time she went shopping with Jacqui she made sure to notice her older sister's technique as she hid things in the buggy where a far too big Michaela was still sitting – the same technique Mercedes would self learn to perfect while 'shopping' for clothes and jewellery in the years to come.


	33. Chapter 33

**33) 'Scary, Baby, Ginger, Posh, Sporty yes now that's your lot'***

As the youngest of Myra's six children, Michaela often felt out of place, as if there wasn't a role left for her in the group. With Jacqui being the headstrong leader, Mercedes the smart and popular one, Tina the quiet intelligent bookworm, Carmel the sweet and adorable beauty, and John Paul – well, the boy – from early childhood, Michaela felt like no one really noticed her.

Where John Paul would hardly have to open his mouth without everyone giving him their full attention, Michaela'd realised early on that she'd have to shout to make people notice. And so shout she did.

Raising all those children had not exactly been an easy task for Myra, but she never had as hard a time staying calm and patient with any of her children as with her youngest daughter. Michaela's constant tantrums were really getting on Myra's nerves, and she'd often find herself stuck in a shouting match with her, the worst of which took place on Michaela's fourth birthday.

Ever since the song came out, Michaela'd been listening to _Wannabe _seventy times a day, and the Spice Girls were really getting on Myra's nerves, almost as much as Michaela's shouting. Thinking this Spice Girls obsession should have to stop, Myra made the huge mistake of deciding not to give in to Michaela's pestering for a flaming red wig along with a complete Ginger Spice outfit as a birthday present. Instead, Myra bought her a complete _Pocahontas_ school set, a school bag and a matching lunch box and juice bottle.

Michaela had loved Pocahontas, but that had been half a year before and she'd all but forgotten her fascination for the long-haired beauty, so when she opened the present, all her hopes were shattered and she threw it against the wall, breaking the lunch box and making her mum lose her temper in the process.

The shouting just spiralled from then on until Jacqui and Mercedes managed to drag their mum out of the room so that the younger children could try and calm their sister down. Half an hour later Myra went back in to try and make peace with her youngest daughter, but as she opened the door, she heard Michaela explain her Spice Girls fascination to Carmel.

"Well, you look like Baby Thpithe, and Jacqui lookth like Thporty Thpithe, and Merthy'th Poth and I know Tina'th not thcary but thee lookth a bit like Thcary Thpithe. Tho I have to be Ginger!"

Quietly, Myra closed the door again and two hours later, she entered her flat carrying a big parcel, containing everything Michaela had wanted for her birthday.

* The title is from the song _Lady Is A Vamp_ by the Spice Girls. I hope that does't break the rules of this forum.


	34. Chapter 34

**34) A Fleeting Interest**

"Donald Peter McQueen! What are you playing at?" Just hearing the rage through his mobile scared Donny half to death and before he was able to stop the primal instinct, he blurted out "Mom, I didn't do it! I swear!" even if he realised on a cognitive level that it wasn't his mother but his little sister who was shouting at him.

It was a Saturday and twenty-five minutes before, Myra's brother Paul had driven John Paul back from the usual family football. The minute he'd entered the flat, John Paul had gone straight to the chest of drawers in the living room and picked up Marty's picture from on top of it and asked his mum who that man was. Myra'd told him that that was her best friend ever, his lovely uncle Marty and asked him why he was so interested and then he'd told her that he'd seen uncle Donny talking to this man in the park after the footie.

Myra'd of course understood right away who Donny's friend had been and after she'd cooled down a tiny bit she'd picked up her phone and rung her brother.

The conversation with Donny really upset Myra. He told her how Ricky'd been watching his son play almost every Saturday for the last three years and how he'd been missing not being able to see his children grow up. And Myra really didn't know what to do. She really didn't want to have anything to do with Ricky ever again, but on the other hand she did feel he had the right to know his children, and more importantly, her children had the right to know him. So after a long thought, she phoned her brother again and asked him for Ricky's number. The following day, she finally gathered enough strength to dial the number and arranged to meet him in the pub later that night.

Meeting Ricky for the first time in over seven years, Myra was struck by how much he seemed to have aged since the last time she'd seen him, and after a short conversation with him, she really started thinking that he'd finally grown up. After a while and a few drinks, both of them started to relax in each other's company and soon, they were laughing and sharing stories.

The following morning, Myra had the questionable pleasure of introducing the man in her bed as their father to her youngest children. Both Michaela and John Paul were shy and apprehensive and kept in the background, hiding behind a frowning Jacqui and a suspicious Tina, while Mercy stood next to them looking at her mum with a small glimmer of hope. Carmel on the other hand had a vague memory of this man as her nice daddy and went straight to him to give him a hug.

Neither Myra nor Ricky had any plans to reunite as a couple. However much she thought he'd changed, she knew she'd never be able to trust him completely ever again, as was evident from the fact that he'd slept with her, even if he'd been married to another woman for less than three months.

The next five months, Ricky had kept on watching John Paul playing football on Saturdays but he no longer hid away in the park, and after a while he even joined in the fun. Then after footie, he'd take his son back home and spend time with Carmel and Michaela, who finally started warming up to her dad. Then one Saturday, Ricky didn't show up in the park, much to John Paul's disappointment. And the following Saturday, he was a no-show again, and again two weeks later.

It was Donny who finally told Myra the news. Ricky's new wife had given birth to a son a month before, and ever since that day, neither John Paul nor Carmel saw their father again.


	35. Chapter 35

**35) An Unexpected Letter**

Five days after Donny told Myra about Ricky's new son, a letter arrived for her in the mail. Myra hadn't received a hand-written letter since she had a pen-pal in Germany as a teenager, and was of course surprised to see one there among the boring bills, especially as she was certain she had seen the hand-writing before. Throwing the unopened bills aside, she sat down in her kitchen and opened the letter. Reading the first few lines she knew right away who had sent it so she ripped it into four pieces and threw it in the bin. Two hours later she went back and picked it up from underneath four used teabags, two empty packages of crisps and the wrappings of the ten biscuits she'd gone through as she thought about what to do. She then pieced the letter back together and started reading again.

_My dear Myra,_

_I hope with all my heart you read this letter and that you will some day find it in your heart to forgive me for the way I abandoned you and your daughters fourteen years ago. You may not know it, but I've always been in touch with your father and have tried my best to know how you were doing. Betty never knew anything about it, and I might as well be honest and tell you that she never mentioned any of you ever again, at least not to me. Myself, I've never been able to forget you. Oh, I tried my best to begin with. I was so angry at you! Not for having Tina, not at all, but for not trusting me with the truth. That anger disappeared soon enough and I know I should have contacted you before, but I was a coward. For one thing, I couldn't go behind Betty's back, even if I know I should have put my foot down, but I was also scared that you would slam the door in my face._

_This cowardice has meant that I've missed out on seeing my granddaughters, or may I allow myself to say grandchildren as I've always seen not only Jacqueline and Mercedes but all your six beautiful children as somehow belonging to my Michael, grow up._

_Myra, I know you've often had a hard time but I have to say, you've done a wonderful job. I just wish I could have been of any help during all those years. I know I only have myself to blame there. I can't even blame Betty for it – I shouldn't have let her decision affect my own._

_You may or may not know it, but Betty passed away a couple of months ago. I asked your father to tell you, but he wasn't sure he'd be able to do it, and I hoped to see you at the funeral. Not that I blame you for not showing up, we didn't deserve your respect after our despicable behaviour._

_Our John now has a family of his own with his wife Linda, a son Harry who's seven like your John Paul and a daughter, Marie-Anne, who's half a year younger than Michaela (you don't know how proud and happy that name made me!), and we've often spoken about how great it would be if they could meet their cousins._

_In fact, John and Linda are coming over for brunch and games every Saturday morning at 11, and all of us would be delighted if you could try to forgive us and join us some day. It doesn't have to be this coming Saturday or the following one – we'll be there whenever you might want to join us._

_I've moved to a different house, as you can see, but the telephone number is still the same._

_Please forgive me and I hope you get in touch!_

_Your father-in-law always,_

_Pete_


	36. Chapter 36

**36) Time For Reconciliation**

As she finally read the letter, Myra knew that Pete meant every word, and she had to admit to herself how much she'd missed the Thompson's. Even Betty had been a friend and an ally until she saw Tina for the first time, and although Myra hadn't been able to face Pete and John at the funeral, she'd still wanted to be there after her dad had told her about Betty losing the fight with cancer. Yes, Pete didn't know that John McQueen hadn't only been telling him news of Myra and the kids – he'd also told Myra news of the Thompson's once in a while.

As she laid the repaired letter back on the table, Myra realised that all the anger and resentment had completely disappeared from her heart during the reading, and had been replaced by pure sadness and regret for what could and what should have been, and she decided that she'd take the kids to see the Thompson's.

It couldn't be the following Saturday though, first she had to speak with her children, starting with Jacqui, Mercy and Tina, to hear what they thought about seeing the Thompson's.

Not surprisingly, Mercedes was the first one to speak after Myra told them what she felt was necessary for the girls to know. She was adamant that they shouldn't have anything to do with those people after the way they'd treated their Tina, and for the first time in years, Jacqui agreed with her sister. Tina, on the other hand, felt like her mum that there had been enough anger and that it was time to forgive and move on.

So the following Saturday Myra's lot took the bus to the new Thompson house where they met their 'new' family. The youngest children didn't really know much about what was happening and were just happy to get new playmates. John Paul and Harry hit it off right away, but Marie-Anne was a bit wary of Michaela's loud voice to begin with.

John's wife Linda had long beautiful hair and Carmel went straight to her and asked whether she could comb her hair and make braids and curls and the two of them spent the next three hours playing beauty saloon.

After looking shyly around the house, Tina sneaked into Pete's library where he found her looking through his _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ and they ended up talking for a long time about history, especially the Norman Invasion. Mercy and Jacqui, on the other hand, stayed with their mother most of the time, both feeling unusually shy and insecure, and hardly said a word the entire day.

A week later, the McQueen's returned to the Thompson's and the same things happened again. And again the following week. It wasn't until they had been coming to see their father's family for over a month that Myra's two eldest daughters started to come out of their shells and they found out how much they had in common with their uncle John and their grandfather, who would tell them wonderful stories from their father's childhood, and it wasn't long before all of Myra's children started thinking of Michael as their common father, who had died.


	37. Chapter 37

**37) A Secret And Some Money**

No one knew anything about Grandpa Pete's heart condition so it was a great shock to all of the Thompson's and the McQueen's when he passed away in his sleep one Wednesday morning a few months after his reconciliation with Myra. The kids were all devastated, as were John and his family, but Myra was totally taken aback by how hard losing Pete hit her herself.

In the past, before she'd fallen out with the Thompson's, Myra'd always shared a special bond with Pete, especially when they'd helped each other working through their grief over losing Michael. Even in the years they didn't speak, she'd often thought about him fondly and missed not being able to seek advice from him with everything that went on with her kids and her relationships, and those few months after she received his letter had really been wonderful.

The funeral was difficult. Myra's parents joined her, both out of respect for Pete and to help her with the kids. Carmel and Michaela cried throughout the whole service and as she tried to soothe her sisters, Tina quietly started sobbing as well. Even Jacqui shed a few tears when the priest had reminisced about her grandfather's generosity, something that Jacqui had personally experienced two years earlier.

Yes, Jacqui and Pete shared a secret. The only time Jacqui had been caught shoplifting, she'd been at the shop without Michaela and her buggy, as Myra'd been at home with her youngest daughter. John Paul was with his sister in the shop, but was oblivious to what was going on. As the security guard in the shop stopped her and asked her to show what she was hiding underneath her jacket, Pete appeared out of nowhere and offered to pay for whatever it was that she'd taken and slipped the security guard a fifty pound note so that he wouldn't call the police. At the time, Jacqui didn't have an idea who this man was, but when she saw him that first Saturday, she recognised him right away. He just winked at her conspiratorially and later when they were on their own in the living room, he asked her not to mention any of this to her mum, which Jacqui eagerly agreed to.

After the service, Myra's parents took the kids to her flat so she could go and have a drink with John and Linda and a few other friends and family. John and Myra were sat next to each other in the pub, and after a few drinks, they started talking about Michael and Pete, and how great things had been in those last few months. That's when John brought up the issue of Pete's will.

He told her that his dad had told him after his mum's death that despite Betty's pestering, he'd never made any great changes to his will back when they'd fallen out with Myra, but only added both of their children when they were born. So John and Myra were inheriting twenty-five per cent each, and the rest was to be split evenly between all their children, but kept in trust funds until their twenty-first birthdays.

Myra didn't completely believe John's words, but a few days later, the Thompson's solicitor contacted her to confirm all the details. It wasn't a fortune Myra was inheriting, but enough so that she was able to cut down on her hours in the pub. In fact, she really just continued working there because she liked most of the punters, and to be totally honest, after working in the pub all those years, the idea of not having an excuse to be somewhere else than home once in a while, wasn't all that appealing.


	38. Chapter 38

**38) The Price Of Freedom**

After having cut down on her hours working in the pub, Myra was finally able to concentrate on bringing up her children, and having missed out on so much during all those years, there were so many things she wanted to make up for. The older girls no longer had to take care of the youngest ones every day and night as Myra now stayed at home most days.

At first, all of the kids were over the moon with these changes. They soon found out how much fun their mum could be when she wasn't tired all the time, but still, it wasn't long before the two eldest girls started noticing the effect of Myra's increased involvement in their everyday lives, and paradoxically, found that an increased free time somehow decreased their freedom to make grown-up decisions.

Jacqui was obviously the one who was hit hardest by these changes. After years of being a substitute mother for her younger siblings, at first she relished in the freedom of not having to come directly home from school, not having to do the shopping, prepare dinner nor having to fight with Michaela to get her to go to bed every night.

Myra hoped Jacqui would use the time she now had for herself to catch up with her school-work, so she repeatedly urged her to get some extra tutoring from her teachers and spend time in the school library. And to begin with, Jacqui did as her mum told her, but she soon found that she was too far behind her class to be anywhere near catching up. And so she gave up.

Later in life, during meetings with her prison councellor, Jacqui would realise that this was the time when she really lost her footing, but there and then, she only felt a little lost. She continued telling her mother that she was spending her afternoons in the library, but in fact she was spending most days roaming the streets. And that's how she started hanging out with Davey.

Davey was in the year ahead of her and had already left school only to be unemployed, running errands for his drug-dealing brother. Not that Davey really had anything to do with that part of the business at the time. No, he was mainly involved with helping out with laundering the money, that is, when he wasn't trying to make some money himself by selling things he'd 'found' left in cars, unlocked or not.

Jacqui herself had developed some skills in the art of snatching things in shops and after hanging out for a while, the two teenagers realised how their individual talents complemented each other's. So they formed an unusual partnership, and Jacqui soon found herself having increasingly more money in her pocket as the months and then the years went by, so she wasn't in any hurry to mend her ways.

Still, the money was never really the reason why Jacqui stayed with Davey all this time. He was her first companion, her peer, her partner, but most of all, Davey was fun. He made her laugh when she felt like crying, not by being cute and childishly funny like her siblings, but in an adult-like way. He was the first one who made her feel like an adult, not a forced-to-be-a-grown-up teenager, and she loved him for it. He was also her first lover.

Myra was never aware of Jacqui and Davey's criminal activities. In fact, she never really met Davey. Not until it was too late, that is – when her daughter finally realised how deeply involved her boyfriend had become in his brother's business, when he'd started dealing himself and beating up those who owed him or his brother money.

And it really wasn't until Jacqui's arrest years later that Myra fully realised the seriousness of her daughter's situation.


	39. Chapter 39

**39) A Lady Of Leisure**

Jacqui wasn't the only one who had a hard time adjusting to the changes. Myra herself would often be filled with doubt whether she'd done the right thing when she'd cut down on her hours. Sure, she loved staying at home with her kids most of the time, but she would often wish things had stayed the same.

Myra had often found herself referred to as the fat woman with all the children, but somehow that had never been her own image of herself. She'd seen herself as so much more; as a mother to her children, a daughter to her parents, a sister to her brothers, a best friend to Marty and many others, a barmaid to her customers and, most of all, as a girl – perhaps a chubby girl, yes, but definitely not as a fat woman.

But becoming a stay-at-home mum slowly changed Myra's perception of herself. For the first time in her life, she really felt like a grown-up woman, alas not in the 'You make me feel like a natural woman!' passionate sense, but in the 'Woman, get me a beer and clean up the mess!' kind of sense, and little by little she found that all week she was waiting for those few hours she was still pulling pints.

Still, she knew she couldn't go back to the way things had been. For one thing, she didn't want to make Jacqui take over her old responsibilities again, and for another, she really thought her kids needed her. Her work had always been an economic necessity, but now her family didn't need that money, and deep down she knew that she'd made the right decision, even if she wasn't enjoying her new role as much as she'd expected.

That's when an old friend suddenly turned up on her doorstep. Shirley had just moved back to town after having followed various blokes around the United Kingdom, and finally all the way to Sydney, Australia. Now back in town, and single for the first time in years, Shirley hadn't waited more than a couple of days before she decided it was time to see her old best friend, and Myra couldn't have been any happier.

The two old mates spent the next couple of days catching up. Shirley told her everything about the various men she'd been living with. One had snored so much that she'd not really slept for the four months they'd stayed together. Another one had freaked her out by sucking the marrow out of every bone, be it pork, beef or chicken. And the Australian hadn't only been called Crocodile Dundee for nothing – he'd not been able to get it up unless his snakes had been in bed with them or they'd been watching Animal Planet. And Myra laughed and cried almost continuously for hours, not only because Shirley was such a fantastic storyteller, but also because Shirley's constant optimism in spite of her serial misfortune with men somehow revealed to Myra how her own life hadn't been all that bad. At least she'd experienced real love. And together with Shirley, she set out to find it again.

Two weeks later, she met the first candidate in a club in Liverpool. His name was Matthew and he told her he was a widowed father of two teenage sons, but on their third date a very angry woman turned up shouting at him. It turned out that his wife was very much alive and very much still married to him.

But Myra didn't let this upset ruin her plans and she kept on trying out different things with Shirley. They went to a speed-dating night in town, but every man stopped listening to her when she told them about her children. They went online in an internet café and put their profiles on a dating website. Shirley got a few dates out of her ad, but all Myra got were a few very badly concealed propositions for one night (or afternoon) stands – made by men who were obviously married.

But all this didn't make Myra give up hope. She was still certain that there was a perfect man out there, just waiting to meet her. And so she kept on looking.


	40. Chapter 40

**40) The Juggler's Secrets**

Mathematics never was Mercedes' strongest subject. She always did rather well at school, but somehow her grades in this one subject were always considerably lower than her average. Incidentally, that all changed around the same time that Myra stopped working so hard – all of a sudden Maths became one of Mercy's top subjects and her mother gladly saw this as a rare sign that she'd made the right decision.

Myra wasn't all wrong. Being able to help her kids more with the homework did make quite a difference for most of them. But Myra McQueen didn't know and never would find out the real secret behind Mercedes' seemingly improving mathematical skills – the help she was getting from her new Maths teacher, Mr Harris.

Mr Harris, or Jamie as he insisted his pupils called him, was fresh out of teacher college when he'd started teaching at the school. He was tall and rather handsome and many of the older kids would develop crushes on him during his first years of teaching. Mercedes was not one of them. On the contrary, she was the one that Mr Harris had a crush on.

Mercedes had been an early bloomer and right away she noticed the effect her good looks had on most of the boys around her. It bothered her quite a lot to begin with. She'd basically gone from just being one of the girls to being the object of teenage boys' sexual fantasies over night so she didn't have a long time to adjust to these changes. But she learned to live with it and after a while she even started using it to her advantage.

And so when she got Mr Harris as a teacher, she noticed the looks he was giving her right away. At first, she was annoyed by the 'pervy stares' as she called them, but when he whispered to her the solution to a problem in the first test they took that autumn, she realised the possible benefits of the situation. And during the next two years, she really did benefit – perhaps she didn't learn all that much maths but at least she brought home the improved grades, which made her mum happy, and a happy Myra meant that Mercy could basically do as she pleased.

With all the boys ogling, Mercedes always had some kind of a boyfriend on her arm. When she was eleven, it had been her classmates Steve and Harry, at twelve it had been Steve again and then George and Phil, both from Jacqui's class, and to the knowledge of her schoolmates, she stayed with Phil for the next three years.

What no one knew at the time, or in fact ever found out, was that when she was fourteen, Mercy miraculously lost her virginity three times, to Phil and her two other boyfriends, Harry and Bobby.

Harry was a seventeen year old guy who lived next door to Myra's parents. He'd seen Mercedes a few times around her grandparents house and when he saw her in town one day, he stopped and asked her to the pictures. She was at Phil that day and accepted the offer, but when she later told him she already had a boyfriend, it was too late – he was already madly in love with her and willing to do whatever it took. So they met once a week for almost a year, before Mercy finally broke up with him.

Bobby was Phil's best mate from football, a bit taller and better looking than him, and he really was the first guy that Mercedes was wild about herself. They sneaked off together at a party and after that, they saw each other behind Phil's back for a few weeks, but the guilt soon started getting to Bobby and he cut it off before she was able to break up with Phil.

It can't be said that Mercy was happy with this situation, but keeping these secrets didn't really bother her all that much. In fact, there only ever was one secret that Mercedes really regretted having kept.

That secret was Jacqui's.

Almost from the start, Mercy heard from Phil everything about Jacqui's skiving. At the time, she didn't know the full details of Jacqui's problems but her loyalty to her elder sister won the battle with her instincts, and when the truth about Jacqui's problems finally came out, Mercedes vowed always to do the right thing when it came to her sister.


	41. Chapter 41

**41) You Can't Beat A Sister**

Myra often wondered how on earth her six children had turned out to be so very different from one another. And what was always even more astounding to her, was that the ones who seemed to be the most different had actually been the best of friends throughout their childhood. Ever since Mercedes had forgotten to wait for Tina after school that day, she'd been extremely protective of her younger sister, and those feelings created a gap between the two that was always in the way of their becoming real friends later on.

Because of how different their personalities were, Myra always expected the childhood friendship between Tina and Carmel to somehow fade away as the girls grew older, but at fourteen and fifteen they were as close as ever. Not that they hung out together all the time. Tina was still very much a loner at school whereas Carmel had a lot of friends, but in spite of this, the two middle sisters still shared the understanding of being an outsider – both among other kids and inside their own family.

Perhaps the more obvious outsider, Tina not only had few mates, she was the only sibling who didn't have a full brother or sister, and her hair and the colour of her skin were different from everyone else in the McQueen family.

On the surface, her pretty blond sister may have seemed to have everything her older sister would have wanted, but Tina still managed to see through that facade. The previous generations of McQueen's might not have had access to great education, but most of them had shown great levels of street smarts. That is, until Carmel came along.

Caroline Melanie was probably the sweetest child ever born into the McQueen family, and she stayed that sweet until her teenage years – sweet, innocent and naive – a trait the older McQueen's would often make fun of. Carmel had always known that her relatives weren't being spiteful, but that didn't stop the jokes from hurting.

Despite having all those friends at school, Carmel didn't really feel any more at home there than among the McQueen's. She was pretty much kept in her place and her friends never took much notice of what she said, unless it was particularly funny – that is, stupid. Actually, she always suspected that if it hadn't been for the fact that she was pretty and a real wizard with the eyeliner and the nail polish, her friends probably wouldn't have given her the time of day.

Carmel had always felt that Tina was her only real ally, the only one who really saw the quiet, innocent quality of her personality and who'd never made fun of her and those two quiet sisters had formed a strange bond to survive their family.

Sadly, Myra was right when she'd assumed that the childhood friendship between the two sisters wouldn't stay intact forever, but it didn't happen the way she'd predicted, because instead of growing apart, Carmel and Tina exploded apart. And it only took one teenage boy.

Raymond Edwards moved to the neighbourhood and joined Tina's class in October when they were fifteen. Raymond was quite a handsome strawberry blond boy of an average height, who immediately turned out to be as interested in his schoolwork as Tina was. The two of them noticed each other right away and with time became good, yet very competitive, friends, who'd go to chess club together while their classmates would either be smoking or kissing behind the sheds near the school.

A few weeks after they met, Tina invited Raymond home after school, something she'd soon regret. Not only had her mum teased her about it for days afterwards, but when he called the McQueen home just days before the next school dance, it was to invite Carmel to go with him. And Carmel accepted.


	42. Chapter 42

**42) The Storm Inside The Calm**

Tina's upset over Raymond and Carmel going out together resulted in the quiet girl's first teenage temper tantrum, and Myra was surprised when it turned out to be the first in an avalanche of tantrums that would follow in the months to come. At first they were only targeted at her sister who didn't know what hit her as she hadn't realised that Tina had a crush on Raymond. But after a while, it seemed as if Tina'd become addicted to expressing her anger and frustrations over all things, big and small.

She'd shout at Mercedes for taking too long in the bathroom, John Paul for walking in his football boots into the room she was still sharing with Carmel, Michaela for finishing the milk, Jacqui for playing loud music and her mum for everything else. The only one she wouldn't shout at, after the initial anger, was Carmel. For six months she managed to give her sister the silent treatment, to totally blank her.

Then it seemed like the ice melted and it finally was Spring in Tina's mind. She stopped shouting and finally started talking to Carmel again. Myra was over the moon, her daughter was finally back to normal. Or that's what she thought.

For Tina hadn't stopped being angry, she'd just realised what it really was she was so angry about. And she'd set out to find out.

Never in a million years had Ricky Boalin expected to see Tina McQueen standing outside his flat waiting for him, but that's what he did one Monday afternoon. When he'd heard her business, he told her everything he knew which wasn't much, that him and Myra had never really shared much about their past love life.

Tina hadn't really expected her former stepfather to know anything, but from the fact that the subject was never mentioned in the McQueen household, she'd assumed (rightly) that her mum wouldn't be willing to discuss it. So she went to the one person that possibly had some knowledge, but would never tell her mum about her visit.

A few weeks passed by after Tina went to see Ricky, and she still hadn't decided what to do when she saw her mum's friend, Shirley, sitting outside a pub with a pint in her hand. Shirley wasn't as surprised as Ricky by Tina's questions. In fact, she'd repeatedly told Myra that she'd have to tell Tina everything sooner than later, but Myra hadn't really wanted to listen, and said that Tina would be better off not knowing anything – which was basically what she knew herself.

Shirley didn't want to give anything away, so she told Tina a tiny part of what she knew, and after Tina'd gone, she phoned Myra right away to let her know that Tina'd been to see her.

On her way home, Tina decided not to beat about the bush anymore and just go directly to her mum as soon as she came home. Myra was expecting this, but as she'd not been ready to have this conversation with her daughter, she made sure to be, however unusually, busy with housework all evening.

Still, Myra knew she was only postponing the inevitable, but how was she supposed to tell her daughter that she was the result of a fling, a one-night-stand, in a hotel in Liverpool.

Surprising herself, it finally was Myra who called on Tina and asked whether she had anything she wanted to ask about. Tina just stood there in the kitchen as she stuttered out the question she'd wanted to ask all those years.

"Mum, who's my dad?"

And as Myra patted on the chair next to her for Tina to sit down, she whispered, as if to herself,

"If only I knew, luv..." before looking at her daughter to tell her everything.


	43. Chapter 43

**43) Clutching At Straws**

Even if she'd always known that each of her children's personalities differed greatly, Myra noticed very early on what she saw as a fundamental difference between her girls and John Paul. This was never any huge surprise to her – she could still remember how different she'd always felt from her brothers, especially as a teenager. Therefore, she was prepared for something new when her only son would start showing signs of puberty.

One of the things Myra remembered about how her brothers had been when they were teenagers, was their obsession with pictures of nude women, especially breasts, and around the age of thirteen all of them had started putting up titty-posters, as she'd used to mockingly call them. Most of those girls only stayed on the wall for a short while only to be replaced by someone with even bigger breasts. The only woman she could remember to have stayed for some time on the wall in Donny's room had been Bo Derek, and the longest-lasting babe in Paul's room had been Samantha Fox.

So when John Paul was twelve-thirteen years old, Myra expected him to start ogling over the page-three girls in the paper and exchange his posters of football players with pictures of Jordan and Playmate-of-the-Year Calenders. But he didn't, in many ways to her delight, as she thought that growing up with all those sisters, might have made him more respectful of women as human beings rather than seeing them as sexual objects. So when she finally found a pornographic magazine under his bed, she was actually a bit disappointed. For John Paul wasn't really much different from other boys his age, even if he sometimes felt a bit different.

This feeling of being different started at a mate's birthday party when they were thirteen. Charlie had three older brothers who'd promised to keep an eye on the lads, so his parents had gone down the pub and left them to it. After a while, the brothers had let themselves disappear as well, so Charlie'd gone to his eldest brother's room and returned with some porno film that they all watched together. It didn't take much for the boys to become excited watching the action, John Paul as well. Still, there was something that bothered him, and when he was alone in his bed later that night, replaying in his mind some of the scenes as he played with himself, he realised to his horror that it hadn't been the girls that he'd been and was still focusing on. This realisation kept him awake that night and for the next few nights he didn't sleep much, but somehow he managed to push the thought aside, if only for a short time.

The next time the lads watched porn together, John Paul noticed how most of them seemed to become even more excited when there was a scene with two girls playing with each other, something he found was totally lost on him. This freaked him out even further and some days later he decided he couldn't deal with this on his own so he confided in the only one he was sure wouldn't mention anything to anyone.

At first, Jacqui tried to make light of the whole matter, but when she saw how genuinely upset her brother really was, she became serious right away and discussed it with him. In the end, she managed to persuade him (if not herself) that it probably had something to do with the fact that he hadn't had many grown men to compare himself with.

John Paul happily accepted this as an explanation; after all, the other boys were always comparing their size in the showers after football and P.E. And when he kissed his class-mate Julie at a school dance shortly afterwards and started going out with her, he decided that it must only have been a phase.

Still, nothing changed the fact that when he was be alone in his bed at night with the dirty magazine he'd nicked at the news-agents, the only thing that would get him going were the few pictures portraying both men and women, and no matter how he'd try to focus on the women, when he'd climax, his eyes would always be glued to the man's face and body.


	44. Chapter 44

**44) Meeting Mr Perfect**

On the eve of her thirty-ninth birthday, Myra went out for a quiet dinner by herself. Even if she wasn't supposed to, she knew that her friend Shirley had organised a surprise party for her the following night. Knowing she'd only have one year before she'd hit the big FOUR-OH, Myra just wanted a few hours on her own to reflect on things. Her life had changed a lot in the last few years. The inheritance had been important - after the first few months of getting used to not working as much, Myra'd finally found her spark again, much thanks to Shirley. Her children were also all doing much better than before, with Jacqui the only exception.

Myra hadn't been pleased to find out that her eldest daughter had taken out all the money in her trust fund and put it in some venture with her boyfriend, whom Myra still hadn't really met properly. And she knew that it was only her own feeling of being indebted to her eldest daughter that stood in the way of her throwing Jacqui out of the nest to stand on her own two feet. And with Mercedes about to turn twenty-one, Myra couldn't help but wonder what her second oldest would do with the money. Myra'd tried to convince all her children that they'd best just let the money stay there and collect interest until they'd really need it, but deep down she knew that only Tina and John Paul agreed with her.

As she finished her meal, the waiter came over and asked whether she wanted anything else. She was just about to say 'No,' and just ask for the bill, when she thought better of it and decided to have a drink before joining her family again. A couple of minutes later the waiter brought her the cognac, and as he put the glass down in front of her, he bowed down and whispered in her ear, "Complements of the gentleman over there."

'Over there' was sat a slightly gray-haired man in his early forties. She smiled and nodded at him to join her. He introduced himself as Phillip Bowman and she was charmed by his calm and quiet demeanour. They sat there talking for an hour, before she told him she'd need to go home, but before she left she gave him her telephone number and he promised to give her a call.

Myra didn't really expect him to ring her, and with all the excitement of her birthday, she actually forgot all about him, so she was very surprised when it was Phillip who woke her up to her hangovers at noon the day after her birthday.

Myra and Phil, as he insisted all his friends called him, had their first date the following evening, and continued to hit it off. He didn't run away in horror at the mention of her six children, nor did he seem too intrigued by the lot. He was just perfect, wanted to know their names and age, and a short description of them, and then said that he hoped he'd meet them someday.

Two weeks later, Myra invited Phil home for the first time. Only her four youngest kids were at home, Mercy were at the pictures with her boyfriend and God only knew where Jacqui was. All the children were charmed by him. He may not have been an instant hit with them, but he seemed like a genuinely nice guy and none of them had seen their mum as happy with a man in years. In fact, only Tina could really remember the happy days with Marty, so they were all pleased to see their mum happy again.

A few months passed, Phil and Myra went on a few romantic weekend trips to get some privacy, and they'd always come back even happier than they'd been before. Ten months after they met, Phil invited Myra to Paris where they stayed for a week. The first night, he took her to a fancy restaurant near the Eiffel Tower. Myra'd never really wanted to taste snails, but Phil was so insistent that she went along and ordered 'escargots' as a starter.

Never in her life had Myra tasted anything as disgusting. The consistence was all slippery and she wasn't able to conceal her disgust as she forced the first bite down. Phil was a bit disappointed but also really understanding when she wasn't able to eat any more. It wasn't until they were back in the hotel room that night, that Myra found out how 'disappointed' he actually was.

The black-eye healed before they returned home and Myra managed to convince herself it was all her fault. After all, escargots were world cuisine and if it hadn't been for her lack of culture and upbringing, she'd have really enjoyed that meal.

Two months later, Phil moved in with the McQueen's.

*Phil and the events around him are based on a character from another fanfic, _The Last Journey _by an author on another forum, using the pen-name Louise1. She kindly allowed me to use her story as basis for this and the next few chapters, and I owe her great thanks for inspiration and for all the help with developing this story.


	45. Chapter 45

**45) What Lies Beneath**

Phillip Bowman instantly charmed everyone Myra introduced him to. Her children liked him and her parents couldn't have been more thrilled for their daughter when she told them that he was moving in. Myra's dad was especially happy to get an insurance agent in the family and was constantly thinking of scams the two of them could plan together, but Phil always just laughed it off and pointed out the flaws in John McQueen's plots.

Ever since the age of two, Michaela had been showing signs of adolescence which only turned worse when she hit puberty. For a long while, Myra had felt stuck and not known how to deal with the situation. Even if she'd already raised five teenagers, none had as blatantly nor loudly disobeyed her – and what was more – directly to her face. And Myra wasn't used to losing an argument with her children, but as soon as Michaela's thirteenth birthday got nearer, her daughter started seeing herself as a grown-up who was entitled to make her own decisions.

Having Phil moving in worried Myra a great deal, especially regarding how her youngest child would react to having another parental figure in the home when the original one seemed to have been more than enough. But as soon as Phil moved in, Myra realised that her fears had been unnecessary. Michaela took to him right away and she hardly threw a single tantrum after he moved in. In fact, life in the McQueen household, or at the Bowman's as Myra secretly started calling her family to herself, had never been more quiet.

Myra's nights out with Shirley became increasingly fewer as she dated Phil and after he moved in, the only way Shirley saw her old friend were at home. Shirley noticed and remarked upon the unusual quietness in the flat, even if the whole family were home, and Myra confided in her how Phil's presence was having a calming effect on all of them, not least herself. She didn't, however, mention how he sometimes would use his fists to settle disagreements in his favour, but Shirley noticed how Myra slightly backed away when she was about to touch her friend's shoulder.

But Myra wasn't the only one who was keeping secrets about Phil. And if Michaela could help it, neither her mum nor her siblings would ever find out anything that happened one day she came home from a friend's house.

It was a Thursday in Mid-June, just over a month after her birthday in fact, that she came home to what she thought was an empty house. She knew that her mum had gone shopping with Shirley and she gathered that all her other siblings were hanging out with mates. What they were doing, she'd never find out, but what would happen that day she'd never forget no matter how hard she tried.

As she entered the flat, Michaela relished in how she'd be able to watch whatever she wanted on telly, so she got herself a can of diet coke from the fridge and a packet of crisps from the cupboard. She just took a sip of her drink before entering the living room when she saw a drunken Phil lying on the sofa, a newly opened bottle of vodka on the table and another empty one scattered on the floor. It wasn't until he'd called for her to sit with him that she noticed that his trousers were down and that he was stroking his erect penis.

Seeing the look of determination and anger in his eyes she didn't dare to disobey him and walked over to sit next to him on the sofa. As she sat down, she felt his hand on her inner thigh, moving upwards.

The touch made Michaela experience the strongest emotion she'd ever felt in her entire life. She closed her eyes as the nausea surged through her entire body like electricity and she threw up all over herself and her mother's partner.

Without saying anything, Phil went off, cleaned himself up and then went to the pub. Just before he left the flat, he gave Michaela a look that told her never to mention this to anyone. When she heard the door close, she slowly rose from the sofa, took the almost full bottle of vodka Phil had left on the table, walked to the bathroom and cleaned herself up, before she finished the bottle off with the new friends she met in the park that evening.


	46. Chapter 46

**46) A Secret Shared By Three**

Myra had seen her share of domestic violence while she'd been working in the pub. Men punching their wives after a few drinks. Women hitting their husbands with beer bottles. Fathers giving their sons a good kicking after a lost football match. Mousy women with black eyes and teeth missing sneaking in to have a quiet drink by themselves while their drunken husbands were passed out at home. She'd seen it all and never been able to understand how people allowed themselves to be treated like that, and she'd often commented to Lenny or the other barmaids on how she'd never in a million years accept to be battered like a haddock by anyone. It wasn't until Phil broke her nose that Myra realised that she'd become one of those people. And by then it was too late, little by little he'd managed to carve pieces from her spirit and weaken her resistance.

It had never been noticed by anyone. Phil was clever enough not to hit Myra in front of her kids, and ever since they came back from Paris he'd concentrated his punches on areas that she could easily conceal under her clothes. Until the night Myra found out that he'd been fired from his job.

Phillip Bowman had been working as an insurance agent for over ten years when his superiors had gathered enough evidence to prove that he'd been involved in a few serious frauds through the years, together with two old mates, one of them his sister's husband. Then one June morning, the day he exposed himself to Michaela, his boss called him into his office and suspended him immediately, telling him that the firm had sent the cases to the police.

Phil went directly to the off-licence before going home where Michaela later found him. Myra was already asleep when he came back from the pub and the following morning he went off to work as if nothing had happened. And that's what he did every day for the next week before his three week summer holidays started.

The truth didn't come out until a couple of weeks after he'd supposedly been back at work. It was Phil's birthday and Myra had been trying to reach him on his mobile for an hour but the battery had gone dead so she called his office for the first time in months. When she asked for Mr Bowman, the summer replacement in the reception told her that no one with that name had been working there since she'd started. Myra was very confused but thanked her and hung up, but rung back a few minutes later and asked for Mrs Burns, the office manager, a very pleasant lady she'd met at a firm reception earlier in the year. Mrs Burns told her everything, leaving Myra in a state of shock.

Still, Myra managed to pull herself together to join Phil at a nice restaurant and then a night out in the pub. After a few drinks, she'd finally gathered enough courage to ask him about the situation. He calmly told her that it had all been a misunderstanding and the police would be clearing his name in a couple of days. He then sweetly asked her if it wasn't time for him to get his real birthday present and she giggled and led him out of the pub.

The door had hardly closed behind them, when Phil's whole demeanour changed and he dragged Myra into an alleyway next to the pub. When she regained consciousness twenty minutes later, Phil was nowhere to be seen and when she stumbled out onto the street, she ran into Jacqui who was on her way home from a night out with her boyfriend, Davey.

On their way home, Myra urged Jacqui to promise that she wouldn't tell anyone had happened, that they'd tell the others she'd fallen flat on her face coming out of the pub, but Jacqui was having none of it. When they finally sneaked their way into the flat, they were surprised to see John Paul standing at the kitchen sink. Seeing the state of his mother, he became absolutely furious, but she still managed to calm both her children, trying to convince them that it really had been her fault, that she'd provoked Phil with questions about things that were none of her business. Finally, seeing their mother's helplessness, Jacqui and John Paul agreed to keep quiet, but they both told her nothing like this should ever happen again. And John Paul even threatened to kill Phil if he'd hurt her again.

Myra's broken nose healed quite quickly and the bruises were almost gone when Phil's solicitor called few weeks later. The phone call wasn't good news. The police were convinced that Phil was guilty of fraud and they were sending their investigation forward to the firm which would decide whether to press charges or not.

After seeing the look on his face, Myra tried to stay out of Phil's way for the rest of the day and the following days as well. Unfortunately that wasn't enough. Two days later, he noticed that one of his shirts hadn't been perfectly ironed around the collar so he taught Myra a lesson in ironing, leaving huge bruises on her right chest, shoulder and upper arm.

It was a very hot August, but Myra still managed to come up with reasons to wear jumpers for a few days, claiming she was feeling a bit under the weather. Then with the washing machine broken, she finally ran out of jumpers and was forced to wear a t-shirt that just barely covered the bruises. Later that day, she was cleaning the flat when she noticed her son looking at her arm with a serious look on his face, but decided not to say anything when he didn't press the matter.

Three days later, Myra went to bingo with Shirley and when she was back home, she was surprised to find all Phil's stuff gone and him nowhere to be seen. None of her children claimed to know anything about his disappearance – that he hadn't been around since any of them came home.

John Paul McQueen was never good at lying to his mum and the small bruise on his left cheek confirmed Myra's suspicions. But she didn't press the matter, and only gave her son a peck on the cheek before going to bed alone.


	47. Chapter 47

**47) Six At The Table**

The day after Phil left, Myra stayed in bed until late afternoon. During those months together, she'd got used to Phil's presence in her bed, the sweet smell of alcohol on his breath, the heat radiating from him so she'd often had to throw her duvet aside, as well as the occasional snores. Lying alone in her bed for the first time in what felt like a lifetime, she wasn't able to fall asleep. There and then, she wasn't able to allow herself to admit what she knew deep down, that she would be better off without him.

Instead, the feeling of being alone again, not only in her bed but in her life, was suffocating her and no matter how much clothes she took on or the number of duvets and blankets she covered herself with, she still felt freezingly cold. And the more she thought about it, the more she felt something she'd never felt before in her life. A resentment towards her children.

How many men hadn't lost interest in her when they'd found out about her children? How many had been willing to take on six children fathered by three other men?

In the freezing cold of this hot August night, the answers to those questions seemed simple to Myra – only one, Phil! And she loved him, she really did. Most of the time, he'd been fun, and he'd been clever and smart and she'd enjoyed their conversations. If only he hadn't ... no, she couldn't allow herself to think those thoughts!

Why did Jacqui and John Paul have to ruin it? What did John Paul do to make him leave?

When Myra finally dragged herself out of bed after an almost sleepless night and morning, she was relieved to find that none of her kids were in. After having her cup of tea, she called Shirley and arranged for them to meet for an emergency drink down the pub.

A few days later she'd hardly said a single word to any of her children. Then one Thursday night as they all but Mercedes were sat at the dinner table, and Myra was handing Tina the gravy, Carmel observed that this was just like old times, really meaning that her older sister wasn't there at mealtime. Everyone else were however reminded of Phil and Myra noticed Jacqui and John Paul glancing at each other suspiciously. As she gave the two of them a warning look, Myra failed to notice her youngest child cringing slightly while putting down her fork, full of food, back on her plate.

After dinner, Tina offered Carmel and herself to clear the table and Jacqui and John Paul to do the dishes which Myra gratefully accepted. While her children were busy, she poured herself a large gin and tonic and sat in the living room. As she was about to take her second sip, she looked around the room and noticed that everything really seemed like it had always been.

Apart from the empty space in her bed and the bedroom closet, it really looked like Phil had never lived there. And suddenly it struck her – he'd never really moved in – none of the furniture were his, he'd never brought a single book or mag into HER home, not even a newspaper – only a toothbrush and some clothes.

While her siblings were busy in the kitchen, Michaela retired into her room to get ready to go out. She'd got a text earlier that day from a mate who had managed to get a hold of a bottle of rum they could share that night. After she changed clothes and put on her make-up, she went to the living room to say goodbye to her mother. When she entered the room, her mum were sitting in her easy chair, her eyes closed and the glass half-empty in her hand. Right away, Michaela'd assumed her mum was asleep and turned to leave the room quietly, but then, still with her eyes closed, Myra smiled and whispered for her daughter to come and sit in her lap.

Michaela hadn't sat in her mum's lap since she was seven years old, but she clumsily and embarrassed dig as she was told. As she let her feet leave the floor and her mum started humming "I'm giving you everything, all that joy can bring this I swear, and all that I want from you is a promise you will be there," Michaela finally relaxed and quietly joined her mother in the song.


	48. Chapter 48

**48) Scratching And Sniffing**

It was a Wednesday afternoon when Myra's luck suddenly changed. She'd gone to the newsagents to buy a lottery ticket and while she was in there the temptation once again proved too big and she bought three scratch cards.

Myra had never been able to resist scratch cards and she'd never been able to wait until she got home to find out whether she'd won or not. That's why everyone in the neighbourhood knew within twenty minutes that Myra McQueen had just won ten thousand pounds on a scratch card.

Myra herself walked back home as if in a trance. Half an hour later, she was still sitting in the kitchen when Mercedes and Carmel came back home. They'd heard the news from Lennie the pub manager and had hurried home as fast as they could. Carmel went straight to her mum and gave her a hug but Mercedes was more skeptical that the news were correct and asked whether if it was true.

Myra didn't say anything, just handed her daughter the three scratch cards. It was correct, the first one clearly revealed that she'd won ten thousand pounds. Mercedes stared at the cards, not believing what she saw, but was pulled back to reality when Carmel snatched the card from her fingers. Then suddenly Mercy noticed that the remaining two cards had not been scratched so she asked her mum what to do with them.

Myra told her to just throw them out, but Mercedes immediately decided against that and got a 10p coin from a glass on the table. Not surprisingly the first card didn't reveal any exciting news, but when she scratched the second card, Mercy's heart started thudding after the first three numbers; ten thousand, ten thousand and fifty pounds. The fourth box revealed thirty thousand.

And when the fifth box had the same number, she only saw black and asked Carmel to finish it.

Myra was still oblivious to the excitement going on only five feet away from her, and it wasn't before she'd heard Carmel shouting that she understood that there was more in store for her.

That Wednesday went down in local history as the day when a McQueen won something fair and square for the first time.

All of a sudden Myra had forty thousand pounds in her possession. And she didn't have a clue what to do with that money. The first person she asked for advice was her father. He told her that the forty thousand pounds would be the perfect down-payment on a bigger flat in her old neighbourhood.

Myra agreed with her father, and the next few weeks they went house-hunting together, but they didn't find anything that felt right for the McQueen's. The flats were either too costly or too small, too old or in need of too much work for them to even consider putting in an offer.

She had basically given up hope that she'd ever find the right flat when Shirley came up with an idea she wasn't able to refuse. An around the world trip to all the places Myra'd always wanted to see – Venice, Florence, Rome, Athens, Tokyo, Sydney, New York, Rio de Janeiro.

A bigger, better flat would wait. Myra McQueen was going on a real holiday.

It was another Wednesday afternoon when Myra's luck suddenly changed again. Her oldest daughter, Jacqueline Bernadette, called her from the police station. And for the first time since she was a baby, Myra heard her eldest daughter cry.


	49. Chapter 49

**49) Justice For Jacqui?**

During all those years of shoplifting, Jacqui McQueen had only been caught that one time, when Grandpa Pete had come to her rescue. Little by little, this achievement gave her a false sense of security and she started taking unnecessary risks; risks that finally led to her arrest. As she was sat in the police station, being questioned by the police, she started out by refusing everything, but when they began showing her what seemed like endless clips from various security cameras in various stores, she realised how serious the situation really was, and as the tears started running down her cheeks, she begged the officers to be allowed to call her mum.

The moment Myra picked Jacqui up at the police station, she knew that the trip around the world would remain a distant dream. Her daughter needed her at home, and Myra felt in her heart that Jacqui's troubles were, if not completely, then at least partly, her fault, that she'd failed her oldest one in the upbringing, laying too many responsibilities on her shoulders as a child and turning a blind eye to her teenage endeavours. And she thought that if she'd fail her yet again, neither one of them would ever be able to forgive her. So Myra stayed at home, and during the months that Jacqui had to await her trial, Myra tried her best to support her daughter, both emotionally and economically.

Myra wanted to pay for Jacqui's defense, and tried her best to convince her daughter to allow her to do so, but Jacqui was too ashamed to accept all that money from her mother. Instead she told Myra that Davey would pay; that it had always been a part of their partnership agreement that if either one ever got caught, the other one would pay. Jacqui was so adamant about this that Myra couldn't but believe her.

Unfortunately, Jacqui and Davey'd never discussed the possibility of their getting caught and when she tried to convince him that he owed her for her silence, he just laughed at her as he offered her the money as a loan. And rather than telling her mother the truth, Jacqui decided to accept the loan which she'd pay after the trial.

In the weeks leading up to the trial, Jacqui and Myra repeatedly argued about whether Myra should attend or not. Out of embarrassment, Jacqui didn't want her mother to witness what would be said in the courtroom, but Myra refused to listen to her daughter, and told her that the matter was settled; that she would be there, no matter what.

Seeing that her mother wouldn't be budged, Jacqui finally gave in. Still, on the day of the trial, she tried to sneak out early in the morning, but was surprised to find her mum already sitting in the kitchen, drinking her tea. Myra told her daughter that she'd known that she'd try and pull a stunt like that so she'd made sure to be up earlier than usually. Least of all, she wanted to tell her daughter the truth, that she hadn't really slept for weeks for worries about what would happen to her daughter.

In all their discussions about the case, Jacqui was convinced that she'd get off, that she might have to pay a fine and that that would be the end of it. She knew plenty of kids who'd got off for things like burglary and violent crimes, and shoplifting would surely not result in a prison sentence.

Myra on the other hand, hadn't been as certain, and even if she tried to keep up both their spirits, in her heart she feared for the worst. So when the judge sentenced Jacqui to eighteen months in prison, the disbelief both of them had expressed wasn't equally genuine. Jacqui was really shocked to find herself sent to prison, but if truth should be told, Myra was mainly glad that her daughter didn't get longer time, and she also knew that eighteen months meant that Jacqui'd probably be out within a year. In fact, secretly, Myra was glad that her daughter hadn't got off lightly, and even if she hadn't wanted for her daughter to go to prison, deep down she hoped that the experience would help Jacqui to get her life in order. But this she didn't and never would admit to anyone, not even herself.


	50. Chapter 50

**50) A Thrilling Time For Tina**

Myra had been right in assuming that Tina'd be the first of her children to use her trust fund wisely. Only God knew, where Jacqui's money had actually gone, and for a long time, Myra dreaded what Mercedes would do with hers. But Tina was always set on going to college, and when she enrolled at Liverpool University, Myra was prouder of her daughter than she'd ever thought possible.

At the time, Myra wasn't able to pay her daughter's tuition fees, but Tina settled the matter herself. She applied for a student loan to cover the fees and decided that the money from Grandpa Pete's trust fund would in time be used to pay back the loans.

Throughout her teenage years, Tina had wondered which direction to take, but her love for books finally won, and she decided to study English literature. She applied at different colleges around the country, and was offered places at Durham, Newcastle and Manchester. The thought of moving away was tempting yet daunting, but when the letter from Liverpool arrived and she realised how relieved she was that she didn't have to leave her family, the matter was settled.

The first weeks of study were thrilling. Sitting in the lecture theatres, listening to the professors and lecturers, taking notes, and trying to connect the theories with the practicalities of the literature itself, was certainly difficult and trying for her concentration, and she often wondered whether she belonged at university. Still, the positive experiences were greater, from simple things like the campus environment and getting to know other students, to more complex things like being valued by them for her intelligence and intellect, and the responses from the teachers to her assignments.

Slowly, Tina settled in her new life as a college student. Commuting every day was a bit boring, but at least she was able to get some reading done on the way. The thrill of campus life quietly faded away as the leaves fell of the trees, and the joyful laughter that in October had seemed to be omnipresent, had silenced as the pressure of the studies started getting to the new students.

Tina finished the first year with a first in all her subjects and enjoyed the following summer, working part-time in the neighbourhood library, and was rejuvenated when she started her second year. The first term went according to her plans, her grades even went up from the first year. Then after Jacqui's arrest, life in the McQueen household turned upside down, and so had Tina's studies.

When Jacqui'd withdrawn from the role as surrogate mother to her siblings, Tina'd been the natural replacement for her older sister as the main babysitter for John Paul and Michaela. And now, with Jacqui in trouble, Myra, without realising it, laid the responsibilities of her youngest children as well as the running of the household on Tina's shoulders. And out of consideration to her mum and Jacqui, Tina didn't say anything.

With these changes, Tina soon started falling behind on her studies. She hardly found time to read what she called the fun part – the novels, the short stories and the poems – let alone the 'boring' stuff – the theories and the philosophy behind the theories. The teachers as well as her fellow students observed those changes and her tutor spoke with her a few times. In an attempt to catch up, Tina repeatedly stayed up until early morning studying, but this only resulted in her falling asleep during lectures.

One day, a month before the exams started, Dylan, one of her friends from the course, approached her and told her he might have a solution to her problems. Desperate to finish the year strongly, Tina set aside her doubts and took the pills. And he'd been right, the following weeks, she only needed a couple of hours' sleep every night and her concentration was great.

The first exam went really well, and so did the others. Near the end, Tina felt that the tiredness was catching up with her and after the last exam, she couldn't really remember everything she'd written, but she knew that she'd written over fifteen pages.

Two days after the last exam, the head of department asked her to come in for a chat. There, he showed her her last exam. Reading through it, she found that the last thirteen pages were an incomprehensible drivel of names of her family members, titles of literary works and a long speech about how tired she was, something she could vaguely remember thinking while she'd been in the exam.

Sitting there in his office, Tina felt her recently budding, yet still very vulnerable, self-esteem crumbling and when she seemed not to be able to stop crying, the head was finally forced to phone for a family member to come pick her up.

It was Mercedes who picked up the telephone in the McQueen flat. As she'd been spending the afternoon with her whoever-it-was-at-the-time boyfriend, she'd only dropped in for five minutes. Upon hearing the head's business, she quickly decided that her mother didn't need to know, at least not at that moment, and she made her boyfriend (who obviously had a car) drive all the way to Liverpool to pick up her sister.

Despite several meetings with the student councelling service during the summer and early autumn, Tina didn't manage to gather the strength needed to resume her studies the following year. Thanks to Mercedes, Myra never found out the real reason behind her daughter's leaving college, but with Jacqui and then Michaela's troubles, she didn't really give the matter much attention either.


	51. Chapter 51

**51) Flying The Nest**

Ever since Grandpa Pete died, Myra had dreaded the thought of her second oldest daughter getting her hands on her inheritance. She didn't know whether her daughter would spend it on clothes, trips to Mallorca or hair and make-up – or all of those things, but she was certain that the money would be out the window as quickly as Tina could spell 'VANISHED'. But Mercedes was full of surprises, even to her mum.

The first week of July, four months before her twenty-first birthday, Mercy's long-suffering boyfriend Robbie invited her to Greece to celebrate his twenty-first birthday. Robbie had lasted surprisingly long as a boyfriend, and all the McQueen's liked him, especially Tina for reasons unknown to anyone but the three of them.

After three days of sunbathing on the beach, Robbie suggested that they'd go sightseeing, but Mercy wasn't interested. She'd seen the pictures of all those old things and really didn't feel like walking up and down hills to look at ancient ruins. So Robbie went by himself, leaving his girlfriend to bake on the beach for one more day. When he returned in the evening, completely in awe of the historical surroundings he'd found himself in, Mercedes, on the other hand, had found herself something new and fresh - a fella.

Stanley Marcus was everything Mercy was looking for in a man, and more – good-looking, funny and well-off – and he took her by storm. When they returned to the UK, she more or less moved in with him – in Manchester, much to Myra's annoyance. Two months later, he was offered a transfer to London and they started looking for a flat of their own in the capital. House prices were much higher in London than in Manchester, and when they finally found their dream flat, Mercedes realised that if they should be able to afford it, she would have to contribute to the down-payment, and the up-coming inheritance was the perfect answer to her prayers.

With the help of Mercy's money, Stanley could secure the flat and they started preparing for the move. Mercedes didn't have much stuff to move so she mostly helped her new boyfriend packing his belongings while he was in London busy at his new work.

After the movers had been at their Manchester flat, Mercedes went to stay with her mum and the others for one weekend before she would take the train to London to start her new life. All the McQueens saw her off at the station. Tina, Carmel, John Paul and Michaela all cried when they said goodbye to their older sister, but Myra managed to hold back her tears of sadness and pride until her daughter was safely on the train. Likewise, Mercedes didn't shed a tear until she saw her mum break down as the train slowly started to move away from the platform.

As the train started approaching London, Mercedes sneaked into the nearest toilet to reapply her make-up, as there was no way, she'd want Stanley to see her raccoon eyes and tear-streaked cheeks when she'd arrive at the station.

Mercedes was surprised that her boyfriend wasn't already waiting at the spot they'd agreed earlier that day, but she also knew that London traffic was famous for being slow when you were in a hurry, so she sat down with a cup of coffee while she waited. Forty-five minutes later, Stanley still hadn't shown up and his mobile was still switched off, so she decided to find herself a black cab to take her to their flat.

As the car slowed down in their road, Mercedes recognised the house by the FOR SALE sign that had been there when they'd been to see the house. It wasn't until she'd put her suitcases down on the pavement and the cab had driven away, that she realised that the sign didn't have the SOLD sign as she would have expected. When no one answered the door, she picked up her phone and called the estate agents, who confirmed her worst fears. The day after they'd put in an offer for the flat, Stanley had withdrawn the offer without any explanation and hadn't been heard from again.

Back at her mum's, Mercedes tried to find out where her boyfriend, and more importantly her money, had disappeared to, but no one had seemed to know anything, apart from one of his old colleagues who told her that Stanley'd been planning a move to the States two years before, but hadn't been able to finance his plans back then.


	52. Chapter 52

**52) Fitting In**

Through the years, Myra had often wondered how it was possible that her only son would be the only one of her six children that she'd never had to worry about. When he was a little boy, she'd often wondered how he'd cope with the lack of male role-models in his life, but he'd turned out like any other boy she'd known. Well, if Myra was totally honest with herself, that wasn't totally true. He would never get into the same kind of trouble she could remember her brothers getting into and if anything, her two eldest daughters were in many ways much more like the typical McQueen boys.

No, John Paul had probably been the easiest out of the lot. He had the McQueen temper alright, but unlike some he'd almost always managed to control it when necessary. He had always done well at school, had never got into real trouble, and had basically always fit in, anywhere he'd ever gone.

With five sisters, John Paul himself often felt like an outsider in his own family, and when he was out playing with his mates, he often wished that he had a brother. Still, as a teenager, he even started feeling alienated from his mates. The growing interest in the opposite sex had seemed to take over everything in their lives and this confused and irritated John Paul.

The focus of football practices was no longer to have fun and become better at the game. With giggling girls on the sidelines all the time, everybody started trying to show off, not only their skills but also their developing muscles and constantly changing hairstyles.

John Paul never felt any need to show off for these girls, something none of his mates ever gave much thought, and if anyone noticed his lack of interest in girls, they always assumed he was just shy and focused. However, this difference confused John Paul himself, and he was always certain that all the others noticed that he never tried to chat up any of the girls.

At the same time that the boys' main topic of conversation became fit girls and sex, John Paul noticed that the words 'queer', 'fairy' and 'poof' had become everyday words among his friends, and those words were definitely not being used in an endearing way. And even if John Paul didn't allow himself to admit for a second that any of these words had anything to do with him, still they stung and filled him with fear that the others knew his deepest secret.

Ever since he'd broken up with his first – and only - girlfriend, Julie, three weeks after they'd started going steady, John Paul had stayed clear of girls. He'd had a few giving him the eye and even trying to chat him up to no avail, and his apparent lack of interest had done nothing to diminish that; in fact, some of them seemed to see that as some kind of challenge, but when nothing came out of it, they'd all just moved on and tried the next cute bloke. Until Mary Anne Langton came along.

Mary Anne moved to town just after John Paul's sixteenth birthday and after joining their class, immediately became the best friend of Laura, the girlfriend of his mate, Joe. When she saw John Paul in the classroom, Mary Anne decided right away that she was gonna get him, after all, both of them having two first names must be a clear sign that they were meant to be together.

Finding out that Mary Anne had a crush on John Paul, Laura was determined to help her new friend bag her man and after some time, managed to persuade a reluctant Joe to help arranging a double date.

The first time they was out, was at the cinema. John Paul didn't know the girls would be joining them and wasn't happy about the arrangement. In fact, he could still not remember anything about the film, even if his life depended on it. He spent the entire night trying to keep his head directed at the screen and his hands still so that Mary Anne wouldn't misread any signals and assume he was going to put his arm around her shoulders.

Mary Anne on the other hand, believed John Paul's lack of contact was due to his shyness, that he was scared of what she'd do if he'd touch her in any way. After a few 'dates' like this, she realised that she'd need to change her tactic and thus convinced Joe that they should organise a party where John Paul could get drunk and relax around her.

The party was held at Laura's place. Her parents were often away and after having raised three older children had got relaxed with any of them having friends over and throwing parties. Laura's oldest brother bought most of the booze and the classmates got quite drunk in a short time. John Paul even became drunk enough to allow himself to be dragged by Mary Anne to 'talk' in one of Laura's brothers' room. They'd been sitting there for a while, chatting about school, when Mary Anne decided to take matters into her own hands and kissed John Paul.

Taken by surprise, John Paul pushed Mary Anne of him and she stumbled and ended up falling on the floor, looking at him in disbelief. And that's when the dreaded words were uttered for the first time:

"You're gay, aren't you?"

John Paul argued and tried his best to convince her that it wasn't the case, that he liked girls, but deep down both of them knew she'd hit the nail on the head. And as she stood up to leave the room, she told him she wouldn't tell a soul – and that she'd even make them all think they'd been in there doing it.

Not knowing that Mary Anne would turn out to be true to her words, John Paul spent the next few months wishing he could just leave town and never return, terrified that any of his mates would ever find out.


	53. Chapter 53

**53) Success At Last**

Ever since Marty's little Caramel was born, she had been a ray of sunshine in the McQueen house. Because of her dyslexia, she'd had her share of troubles with schoolwork, but through her own hard work, Myra's determination and good help from her teachers she finished her schooling with much better grades than anyone had ever expected. She barely passed, but pass she did. Still, further studies were not in anyone's plans for Carmel, but Myra was convinced that her daughter's sunny disposition would see her sailing through life without many problems.

And so far, Myra had been proven to be right. Work wasn't easy to find but still, Carmel managed to find herself a part-time job right away, assisting the local hairdresser, making coffee, sweeping the floor and shampooing the ladies. Mrs Harris wasn't willing to take on an apprentice, so after a year working for her, Carmel had found a similar job in a bigger saloon, with the promise that Mr Piergentili would make her an apprentice when one of his current ones would finish within six months.

During that time, Carmel was in the saloon six days a week at exactly eight forty-five in the morning, so that the coffee and the magazines would be ready when both the hairdressers and the first costumers arrived at nine. After five months, Janey, one of the apprentices was just about to finish, so Carmel decided it was the perfect time to ask her boss when she would start her apprenticeship. Mr Piergentili smiled at her apologetically and told her that he'd forgot to tell her that his wife's niece had asked for a job and he'd kind of promised her the apprenticeship, but if Carmel could come to his flat at ten o'clock that night he and his wife would be willing to discuss the matter.

Hearing this news, Carmel was disappointed but hoping that she'd be able to convince Mr Piergentili to change his mind, she rang the bell at his flat at exactly two minutes past ten that same night. As he opened the door and invited her into his living-room, he told her that Mrs Piergentili had unfortunately been forced to visit her mother and couldn't meet with them.

After getting both of them a glass of wine, Mr Piergentili sat down next to Carmel on the sofa and as he put his right hand on her thigh, he told her how impressed he was with her work so far and that he hoped she'd continue to impress him so that he'd reconsider and give her the job.

Realising her boss's intentions, Carmel rushed to her feet, knocking her full glass on the table so the wine spilled all over, shouting at him that she wasn't that kind of a girl, before she storming out of his flat.

This disastrous experience put her off becoming a hairdresser and Myra told her she should stay well clear of the beauty industry; the people there were all the same and would treat her as a piece of meat and not as a person. Instead, she suggested that Carmel found herself a decent job, maybe in a shop or a restaurant, and her daughter listened to her words and a few days later, she was the proud new assistant in H&M.

In the next couple of years, Carmel had a few different jobs, most of them in shops, but it was in a high street pizzeria where she'd been working as a waitress that a customer asked her if she did her own make-up. Excitedly, Carmel told her everything about how she loved buying new cosmetics and experimenting with colours, both on herself and her friends. After two minutes, the lady stopped her and asked whether she'd ever considered becoming a beautician and told her that she clearly had the talent for it. Before she left the restaurant, the lady gave her the address of a London academy where she'd be able to become even better so she'd be able to find a job in the business.

A week later, Carmel signed up at the academy and started preparing for her stay in London, and much to Myra's disagreement she decided to use a big part of her inheritance to pay for the education. But Carmel stuck to her guns and the move proved to be right. For the first time in her life, Carmel actually experienced success at anything else than her good looks. From the first class, she proved to be the star student, not only did she have the best basic technique, but she also seemed to have the greatest imagination when it came to deciding which products to use for each model.

After the course ended, a few agencies in London offered Carmel a job, but even if she was tempted, she'd been missing her family too much during her time in the big city so she opted to move back to her mum's. But not before going on an extravagant trip to New York with her new mates for two wonderful weeks.

And when Myra saw how proud and happy her daughter was when she showed the family her new diploma, she finally realised that she didn't always know best when it came to her children.


	54. Chapter 54

**54) The Ball Starts Rolling**

It was a Thursday afternoon near the middle of March. Myra was down the pub with Shirley who'd been in town for a few days to check on her parents after having moved to Birmingham just before Christmas with her new boyfriend Lou.

Shirley was in the middle of what she found a shocking story about Lou's sister Tara and how she'd just left her husband Barry for a teacher at their children's school, when Myra noticed the vibration in her purse on the table. And as she fished for her phone which was blasting out the fake trumpet beginning of _A Final Countdown_, she was completely unaware of how Shirley's last words would be edged in her mind a few months later:

- "... and how she reckons, Barry's gonna let her raise his children with that woman, is beyond me!"

Myra had often been irritated and annoyed by mobile phones ringing wherever and whenever, and ever since she'd finally given in and bought herself one, she'd repeatedly cursed the person who invented this constant intruder. But that day, in spite of the bad news she received, deep down she was glad that she hadn't waited longer to find out what kind of trouble her youngest daughter was in.

Michaela hadn't had an easy time as a teenager. Ever since 'that thing with Phil', as she called it in her mind, she'd wanted to stay as far away from the living room as possible. She'd often thought about running away from home, but knew that it wasn't the solution to her problems. Instead, she started hanging out around town with a group of older kids, some of whom had dropped out of school earlier in the year or the year before. Michaela herself had always done rather well at school and was careful enough not to start skiving as she knew John Paul would find out. Therefore, she wouldn't join her new friends until in the afternoon, when they'd almost always been a bit drunk already and willing to share whatever booze they had that day.

Still, the change in Michaela didn't go unnoticed by her teachers and as her grades started slipping, so did her determination to keep up appearances at school and by January, she'd started leaving early to join her friends in the search for alcohol which seemed to get harder and harder to find. Then one dry day, Paulie, a seventeen-year-old who would sometimes hang out with them, brought some of his older brother's skunk and Michaela smoked for the first time.

That day marked a change for some of the kids, who from then on rather chose to spend their days on a stoney cloud rather than getting hammered. Michaela herself was trying her best to keep her life under control and was scared of this change in her friends, and for a few weeks she stayed away and tried hard to resist the temptation to join them again. Until the day Miss Hammond finally had enough.

Miss Hammond was Michaela's English teacher, a quiet and rather nervous woman in her early forties. Her doe-like eyes always revealed how scared she seemed of her teenage pupils, who again always wondered how she'd lasted fifteen years as a teacher. Miss Hammond's classes were by far the loudest of all, her voice could seldom be heard further than the first row, but still, she kept going and pretended that nothing was wrong in her classroom. Then one Tuesday in late February, it all got too much for her. All the boys were gathered in the far corner and were animatedly discussing Rooney's goals in the last match and most of the girls were giggling over some horrible pictures of famous people. Michaela was actually one of a handful who was actually following the lesson, when a note for her came flying from her friend, Dora, who was sitting in the other end of the classroom. And as Michaela raised her hands to catch the note, Miss Hammond's voice could finally be heard all over school, as she pointed at Michaela and Dora and shouted 'OUT! NOW!'

Shocked, both girls picked up their belongings and left the classroom, but as the shock wore off, anger took over. Dora stormed off to talk to her parents to get them to sort this out. Michaela, on the other hand, hadn't felt as strong a feeling since the day, Phil exposed himself to her, and to get rid of that feeling she chose the only way she'd become used to; she went to search for her mates.

When Myra got the phone call a couple of weeks later, Michaela hadn't been back to classes at all. Sure, she got up every morning and walked with John Paul to the school building, but once there, she'd hide in the girls' toilets until classes started and then she'd be free to go wherever she wanted. Her brother knew something was up, but he was too preoccupied with his own problems to give his younger sister much thought.

Finding out her daughter had spent most of the school year drunk, and the last thee weeks stoned, at first Myra felt an extreme rage towards her children's school, but halfway through a stormful meeting with the headmaster and the school councellor, she just felt helplessness surge through her body and she slumped down into her chair in the headmaster's office, crying.

The following day she kept her youngest daughter at home and when she'd gathered her own thought, she had a good talk with her. Michaela was adamant that she would never go back to that school and Myra didn't really blame her. Herself, she also felt like a fresh start in a new neighbourhood, and so she agreed that her daughter could change schools right away and the family would relocate when they'd found the right flat.

Already the following Tuesday, Michaela had her first school day at Hollyoaks High and found herself sitting next to a pretty girl with the longest hair she'd ever seen.


	55. Chapter 55

**55) Starting Afresh**

Finding the perfect flat didn't take as long as Myra expected. Of course, she soon learned that there were plenty of houses for sale in Hollyoaks, but with five children still at home and Jacqui likely to move back in after her time in prison, she was sure that the houses would all be too small or too expensive for her. So she gave herself as much as half a year to find the perfect flat and if she wouldn't have found the right house by then, she'd settle for second or even third best.

From the start, Myra told Michaela that she'd have to take the bus to school until the family moved to Hollyoaks, and she was pleasantly surprised by how well her youngest daughter, who until then had hated all public transport, accepted that fate.

The truth was, of course, that Michaela still hated taking the bus. However, the idea of no-one in her new surroundings knowing anything about her, or any of the other McQueen's for that matter, definitely outweighed that hatred. Michaela wanted to keep things like that for as long as possible, and every night she'd go down on her knees in front of her bed and pray to God that her mum would never find a suitable house. Also in the hope that the McQueen's would never move to Hollyoaks, she had, on the first day at the new school, made up a story for the teacher that her last name had just been changed to Jones after her parents' divorce, and that the old school had just made the mistake of putting the wrong name in when they'd filled out the transfer papers. This tiny little lie would soon be corrected, of course, much to Michaela's dismay.

Some weeks later, Mercedes was told by the manager of the pub where she'd been working since she returned from London, that the pub would be closing for massive refurbishment so she'd be out of a job for at least four months. The manager's wife, who had often noticed the looks her husband gave the McQueen girl, added that she wasn't likely to be rehired after the changes, as they were hoping for a new clientele, and that Mercy wasn't exactly likely to bring in the people they were looking for.

So, for what definitely was not the first time in her life, Mercedes stormed off halfway through her shift, surprising herself by not telling the wife on her way out, all about the fun she'd been having with the manager behind her back for the last few months.

Seeing this as a chance to start afresh like her youngest sister, Mercedes quickly started looking for work in Hollyoaks, but was quite disappointed in how long it took.

Another member of the family who couldn't wait to start afresh, was the only male in the McQueen household. For a long time, John Paul had been living in fear that someone would find out his big secret, and he saw the move to Hollyoaks as a new beginning. Once there, he would be able to concentrate on his school and the football, and, most of all, stay clear of girls, as they would just lead to a lot of trouble when finding out his lack of sexual interest. He only had a year left and then he'd leave town and seek his fortune and happiness somewhere else in the world, far away from everybody who knew him.

He'd only have to find some good mates in Hollyoaks, and then he'd be safe.

Myra had only visited (and rejected) a handful of houses her real estate agents thought might be suitable for her family when her phone rang early one Friday morning. He'd just had a new client come in, with a six-bedroom house in the heart of Hollyoaks. The owners were leaving town and had to sell quickly and were willing to drop the price for the right family. Myra rushed out of bed and took a quick shower before taking a cab to the agent's office where the owners were waiting for her. When Myra started by showing them pictures of all her children, they were taken aback a little but only a few minutes into the conversation, they started liking this straight-talking woman who obviously loved her family more than anything else in the world.

Two hours later, Myra left her new house with a signed contract, knowing that all her troubles were over.

THE END

Thank you for reading. Comments would be appreciated! :)


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